20 Years of Angel Investing…

My friend Josh Maher asked if I would take part on his book on Angel investing.

Seeing that it’s been over 20 years since I made my first angel investment in Pro-Innovative-Concepts (which means I am getting really old), I thought it would be a great idea. I have posted the 45 minute interview below (minutes 21-23 were a $GOOG hangout snafu).

After graduating from Thunderbird (Arizona) in 1991, I turned down a ‘Purchasing’ job at Intel, in Santa Clara, that would have paid $60,000. At the time, PC’s were machines used by someone I paid to write my graduate school papers.

I turned down the job and obviously my life path was changed. I became a stock broker. My first angel investment came 6 months later and it started with a cold call. It was 1992. There was no usable internet for the masses. Actually, last night Marc Andreesen wrote that he began working on Netscape in March 1994. I probably should have stayed at Intel and caught the ‘Intel Inside’ boom of the 90’s.

The one thing that has not changed since my first angel investment in Pro-Innovative is the ‘Purity of Angel Investing‘that Fred describes.

Lately I have been a ‘Micro VC’ and I think Jeff Clavier does a great job of describing what that is really like.

I hope you enjoy the interview:

One comment

  1. loved your analogy between high frequency trading grinding out fractions of pennies and football lineman in the trenches. that’s not where gains are made. spot on!

    ps, believe you were thinking of george carlin :)

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