05-30-2014

FG Angels Update After 13 Investments

by Brad Feld

As of today we have made 13 investments via FG Angels – 11 have been announced and two will be closed within a week.

On 10/1/13, we announced that we were going to create a syndicate on AngelList and start doing seed investments that way. Our plan was to make 50 seed investments by the end of 2014, using the angel strategy that Brad has been using for his own angel investing since 1994.

We spent the balance of 2013 figuring out a long list of legal issues, including vexing ones like the 99 investor problem, and whether we were going to use 506(c) or 506(b) for our securities exemptions.  We opened up the FG Angels syndicate, and closed our first investment in early January 2014 in OnTheGo Platform.

Since then we’ve closed a total of 11investments. You can see them on the FG Angels tab on our Foundry Group portfolio page.  The other two will be announced and put up on the site once they close.

The FG Angels syndicate now has 193 investors who commit up to $455,000 per investment. At first we thought these were interesting numbers, but now we realize they are simply vanity metrics given the 99 investor rule.

Each of our syndicates have ranged between $125,000 and $300,000, not including the $50,000 from us. It’s been hard to figure out what drives this on a case by case basis as we are generally equally enthusiastic about each of the companies. Originally we were using a minimum of $1,000 per investor but decided to raise it to $2,000 given the 99 investor rule. That had a little impact, but less than we expected.

A month ago we felt like the issue might be syndicate fatigue, which surprised us given that we’ve been clear that we are going to do 50 investments and the best strategy for an angel would be to invest in each of them along side us. But then we had a few investments where the amount trended up, so that probably wasn’t it.

It’s been an interesting experiment so far. AngelList has continued to be awesome to work with and we are excited about the angel portfolio we have been creating.