Learning Blog > Startup Financial Planning
April 21, 2025
A common experience for relatively inexperienced angel investors comes from our past careers, where the work of the day tended to produce quicker feedback. As employees, we had tasks and projects with deadlines. We completed them and received management and peer feedback. For any of us who were small business owners, driving for weekly, monthly, and quarterly results to pay others and ourselves produced steady stimulus.
But as angel investors, we do a lot of regular work, much of which feels like starting projects we never complete. (Evaluating deals that we start to dig into before ejecting and bailing out.) In fact, at this year’s ACA conference, one of the plenary presenters discussed the importance of spending the first 80% of your regular efforts looking for reasons to say ‘no’.
Intake funnels go through dry spells quite regularly, and it’s even tougher when the market conditions for later-stage funding and exits are so depressed, forcing even greater scrutiny at early stages. It’s easy to start to wonder if our time spent is worth it.
Another pressure is that of an ecosystem of ‘tax agents’ around us who make their money on the deployment of our capital, unlike investors who only make anything on the harvesting of capital from an exit. I have witnessed more than a couple of investors who justify the old idiom of money burning holes in their pockets, that they are just itching to put someplace even if hope is overcoming fear or sense.
Click the button below to read the rest of this very informative article from Desert Angels Board Chairman, Jeff Koenig