Desert Angels considers more than 2,000 startup and early-stage funding applications per year. Over the past 3 years, we find that many applications cause our members to be reminded of a concept understood in Silicon Valley fundraising attributed to Peter Thiel.
Loosely, [startup] companies that check all the boxes of being capable of high performance are the only ones that succeed, and investments in startups displaying mediocre (average, merely adequate) performance will roughly all fail.
As a leader in the angel investment marketplace, Desert Angels is in the process of leading our members and the world of angel investment forward in making the decision that it is time to stop investing in merely adequately prepared, planned and/or led companies that might get lucky. We need to be investing in companies that, when we lose, it was because that company should have succeeded and simply was very unlucky.
This is a perspective not shared by the anchor weights in the ecosystem that still tell us we are here to help any startup with a liked founder or a desirable solution find their bit of luck. We no longer have the resources to contend with these voices, if we ever did. Adhering to this approach is entirely unfair to the developing early-stage and startup businesses that with their presentation and through our due diligence efforts demonstrate that they possess the team, attitude and wherewithal to achieve both their solution together with a well-formed go-to-market plan.