Do Angel Investors Typically Charge to Present?

A developing story from /SAbackchan. For full discussion and information, click on through to the post.

Do Angel Investors Typically Charge to Present?
(http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2009/08/an-angel-investor-group-move-that-make-me-vomit.html)

Brad Feld has an eye opening post about a trend on Angel investing – apparently it’s increasingly common for Angel groups to charge entreprenuers to present and pitch?

From Feld’s post:

“I think it is grotesque that an organized angel investor group would charge an entrepreneur to present to their members. This is in response to the article I read over the weekend in the New York Times titled Angel Investors Become Less Available where this practice is described.”

(http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/20/angel-investors-become-a-little-less-available/)

Is that right? I’d never heard of that practice. Sounds outrageous to me, but sure as life, there’s a guy in the comments talking about the reasons why they do this:

Steve Murchie: “I have been very sensitive to the local environment, and have tried to keep fees in line with our activity. We started out free, raised to $500 after we made about $500K in cumulative investments, and raised again to $1000 after we hit 25 active members and about $2M in cumulative investments. I’ve stayed at that level since…”

“A couple significant points of note: Keiretsu Forum tends to fund post-seed rounds, where the company is showing traction in the market – typically that means they are revenue-generating. As such, the time/treasure tradeoff is a lot more quantifiable. If a seed-stage or weaker opportunity makes it through, I let them know the odds and let them make the call. We also look at non-traditional deals
like real-estate funds, where the whole fee discussion is superflous.”

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Do Angel Investors Typically Charge to P…

About Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins

Founding Editor for the SiliconANGLE Network. Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins was previously the first Associate Editor at Mashable. In addition to being a New Media pioneer, he has developed standards and software for IBM, Cox Communications and Nokia.