The Angel Investor's Handbook: How to Profit from Early-Stage Investing

This book provides a good reference guide for investors and entrepreneurs alike. While expert angel investor or experienced entrepreneurs may find the information in here a bit obvious, for relative newbies this book is quite useful and an intuitive read. The entrepreneurs can benefit from learning what the investor would care about, what types of investor to look for, and where to look for them. For investors, the books provides a simple reference of the type of due diligence to do to get comfortable with a startup. With the venture capital firms growing up in size and getting out of early stage ventures, angel investors have grown all the more important. Highly recommended.

The book contains a lot of very valuable information. It is geared primarily towards the investor who wants to explore angel investing, i.e. private investmentment in early-stage enterprises. The book does a good job in explaining the risks, necessary time commitment and potential benefits of angel investing. Thankfully, it is not of the 'how to get rich easy' kind. On the negative side, the book repeats some of its points ad nauseam and is not a stylistic masterwork.

Gerald A. Benjamin and Joel Margulis tell the current or prospective angel or early-stage investor how to best judge pre-IPO investments. They emphasize matching investors with the right entrepreneurs to create an effective team in which the investor not only provides the seed or early-stage capital but also contributes good advice and contacts. Besides discussing effective strategies, the book includes an extensive directory of top venture forums, angel organizations, publications and Web sites. In addition, any investor will benefit from the thorough rundown of due-diligence points that the authors recommend. While the book is targeted at prospective investors, we [...] encourage entrepreneurs with start-up companies to use it as a productive guide to making more effective funding pitches, although the companion book for entrepreneurs would probably be more helpful. One caveat: Some ideas are repeated - even with similar wording - from chapter to chapter. But overall this is a solid book, even though the free flows of money it evokes have been arrested somewhat lately.