Why am I an angel investor?

Why am I an angel investor?

I was informed about this meetup by my friend just before I was about to hit the bed. Two things made me decide to attend this event. 1. I didn’t have any wok scheduled for today, and 2. Though I was not in a plan for pulling in an Angel Investor,  I was curious to know how an Angel Investor works.

I and my friend carpooled and we reached the IITM Research Park in time, well, I would say, we reached too early. 

That’s the first time I am walking into the IITM Research Park. The moment I stepped into the building, I mistook the food court tables to be the cubicles and asked my friend, “is this the place u people work?” and couple with my other remarks I made sitting there and me laughing out a lot, in fact made my friend doubt whether I had been drunk.

Then I was told that the meetup registration has started. I registered for the event by paying Rs.100/- . I would say it’s too cheap for an entry registration, so I thought many people gonna turn up for the event. But it seemed I was the first one to pay the entry fee to register for the event. And I was in a “I wanna pull anyone’s leg now” mood, so I was asking for an early bird offer.

And yeah, after few minutes, few more people had registered and the event started.  The guests for the "Why am I an Angel Investor?" meetup were supposed to be Mr. Subramaniam Iyer, Executive Director, SmartKapital and Mohan Narayanan Founder & CEO, KUBOS Consultancy Services.

The session was chaired by Mr.Muthu Singaram, CEO of Ultimate Startups who had arranged for this event and Mr.Subramaniam sharing his insights and experiences on being an angel investor and his journey in that domain.

Mr.Mohan joined the session an hour later and he too shared his insights and experiences on his mentoring the start-ups.

This meetup focused on the important things that an entrepreneur needs to know about angel investing.

Few questions I got the answers from these two seasoned industry veterans were

• What do angel investors look for in an entrepreneur?

• What are the important things for an entrepreneur? 

• What are the reasons for rejecting an investment? 

• What kind of questions angel investors ask?

• How do the Angels evaluate the business model?

• What do they expect out of a start-up team?

Mr.Subramaniam shared his insights behind choosing a start-up team and the below is the criteria that he felt to be the basic one for any angel to choose a team to fund.

• The idea should be an irresistible one

• There should be a market

• The idea should have the potential to stay

• The team behind the idea should be capable of executing and delivering the idea

Ended up learning a lot about angel investing and insights about how to create a convincing investment pitching plan by thinking in terms of the Angel Investors perspective.

I should say Thanks to the organizers for arranging this meetup.

Kudos Guys..Keep doing it..