They have more friends than you think!

Well, not friends necessarily, but to be more precise, they have roughly 3 followers for every 1 person they are following. On average an investor is following ~200 people and has ~600 followers, which is quite high and somewhat surprising given the powerhouse social networks out there. This suggests that the investors that are on AngelList are quite engaged – kudos to AngelList for finding a good niche.

 

50% of investors live in SF or NY. 

But SF has more than triple the number of investors compared to NY. This is not altogether that surprising, what is though is that Los Angeles comes in 3rd, Boston in 4th, and Austin in 5th?! Most people think of Boston as #3 due to the funding reports, but South California has a growing tech scene that is not to be ignored. Perhaps it is partly due to spillover from SF, and partly due to adoption of crowdfunding in the area.

 

Stanford has 2x more investors than the next closest school, MIT.

Again, not too much of a jaw-dropper here, but looking more closely, there are some interesting takeaways – UC Berkeley beating Harvard for 3rd place,  with U Michigan, U Penn, and Cornell taking 5th-7th. Overall, the East coast beat the West coast by 3 percentage points at 9.7% to 12.7% – East Coast, Beast Coast.

 

They invest like, well.. angels of course!

Investors will tell you that in most cases there is a big difference between angel investing and venture capital funds. And while there certainly is overlap, part of that difference is reflected by the frequency and size of angel investments. The most common investment size on AngelList is $25k, the maximum investment appetite is $465k, and between the large and small bets, an investor is putting in around $200k per deal on average 11 times during their career. 

So what did we learn today?

Things are shaking up geographically, there are some schools that have a strong entrepreneurial lineage that you wouldn’t expect, East coast beats West coast on number of angel investors, and angels generally play in the $25k-$200k investment range.

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Cheers,

Michael Berliner