Learning Blog > Startup Financial Planning
October 28, 2025 – Jeff Koenig, Chairman, Desert Angels
With full credit for the image above to Visual Capitalist from this article: Visualizing America’s Wealth by Generation, leaders of the first digital generation have a message for the generation that invented digital’s building blocks, because it has everything to do with their aspirations for the digital natives coming behind both of us.
I’m Gen X and have been an angel investor coming up on just a decade. With what I have experienced, thank God, I’ve still got horizon.
But now as an angel group leader and someone whose past professional pursuits caused me to pay attention to the importance of population demographics, I have been perplexed by the stubborn status quo thinking my angel forebears seem to be stuck with.
I have been preaching for some time now to a choir of peers in my generation that we need to make significant operational changes in how we invest and improve the results, or this activity is going to die an ignominious death. Those my age entering into leadership are saying oh, hell yes .. intuitively.
But we are not in full control yet – lots of our forebears, 10-20 years older than we are still holding the reigns. We are trying to speak to you about the state of the cart & horses you are instructing us on how to drive, but you keep using old repair parts and telling us we aren’t allowed to remodel.