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A good personal philosophy to help you be both happy and driven.

Because of these facts, Operator Angels have become an increasingly large part of the early-stage funding that goes into new companies. And because it keeps getting easier to become one, a larger and more diverse group of people become Operator Angels every year. I expect this trend will continue for the foreseeable future.

You should approach fundraising the same way a salesperson would approach challenger selling. Your job is not to find a VC that understands the problems your company is facing, but to educate them on a better way to do something that they hadn’t considered before. Founders that are good at fundraising know something compelling about where the future is going and teach that to investors so they can come along the journey with you.

We need to know that something is bad before we can address the issues causing it, but we are hard-wired to internalize bad news preferentially. That means that the faster we learn about bad things, the faster we fix them and make the world better, but the more convinced we become that the world is a bad place. That’s “The Sunlight Fallacy.”

Pitching VCs is a learned skil that you can get better at. With some relatively simple foundational habits, you can improve how rapidly you get better at pitching.

All new ideas sound either trivial or impossible. This makes it easy to dismiss all new ideas as not innovative, especially compared to established ideas which are now clearly meaningful. With gestation time, innovations mature and it becomes easier to identify which are truly important.

This presentation has been viewed over 475,000 times since it was published. Success as an angel investor boils down to whether you can pick the right companies. The information in this presentation won’t make you a successful angel investor on it’s own, but it can help you avoid the common pitfalls and develop a better understanding of how this market works and whether you’re ready for it.

1-1s are critical. They make sure blockers aren’t shutting something down and they help us develop rapport and trust. Here are some ideas on how we make the most of meeting once a week.