Yesterday I spent the afternoon with some of the top angel investors in Silicon Valley at AngelConf. It was put on by the super nice people at Y Combinator and had a great crowd of about 80+ angel investors, entrepreneurs, venture capitalist and journalist.
What I found most interesting was the repeated characteristics of a successful Angel investor. Here’s the 4 took aways I got from the sessions.
- Don’t do it for the money or you’ll be disappointed.
- You have a to be a nice guy. You can’t fake it – you really need to be a good person.
- Most of the time, you’ll be wrong.
- Pay it forward, and add value to every deal you see.
My favorite talks were by Mike Maples (invested in Digg, Twitter), the Panel Discussion moderator by Dave McClure (invested in Mint, SlideShare), Naval Ravikant (invested in Twitter, Disqus) and Michael Arringtons (Founder & Co-Editor of TechCrunch.com) with his summary at the end.
Another big shocker was how relaxed and zen-like Michael Arrington seemed. I spoke with him after the event about his vacation and he said it allowed him to “reset things”. I’m happy for him. You can tell he’s trully passionate about startups and it’s good to see him back, focused and with a smile on his face.
Today was a big win for startups – more people were taught by the world best Angels how to do it right, and most of all, just do it.
Included among the speakers were:
Michael Arrington
Paul Buchheit
Jeff Clavier
Ron Conway
Michael Dearing
Paul Graham
Carolynn Levy
Dave McClure
Page Mailliard
Mike Maples
Ariel Poler
Naval Ravikant
Aydin Senkut
Jim Young
Andrea Zurek
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