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What is one pro or con of working with more than one angel investor at a time?
1. Pro: Support and Vision
Trustify’s Angel Investors are an incredibly supportive group of individuals. They are motivated for us to succeed, understand our business, and trust our leadership. They provide us with key introductions, help us penetrate various verticals we want to explore and offer unwavering support of our vision. Working with multiple angel investors, who are all a good fit, can be incredibly beneficial. – Jennifer Mellon, Trustify
2. Con: Not Agreeing With Each Other
When you have one angel investor, you can devote your time to working closely with that person, bouncing ideas back and forth, and turning your project into a collaboration. While this is possible with two or more angel investors, it’s less likely to happen because you will have two parties taking up a similar role, and collaboration will take more coordination/cooperation. – Dave Nevogt, Hubstaff.com
3. Pro: Access to Their Portfolio Companies
Angel investors are generous with their introductions and often invite you to tap the other entrepreneurs in their network. With multiple angels backing your business, you can leverage their collective influence and connections to grow your business. Even if one of your angels is unresponsive or declines to offer an intro, you can simply name drop them when requesting meetings with other founders. – Firas Kittaneh, Amerisleep
4. Con: Keeping Your Story Straight
One con is that you want to make sure your story delivers a congruent message to all investors. Most importantly, you want to make sure they all understand that message the same way. If they don’t, that can be a problem. – Kevin Xu, Mebo International
5. Pro: Access to Multiple Minds
Finding multiple strategic angels makes sense. This way, you can create your own mind trust of experts who believe in you and are financially invested in making sure you have the knowledge to succeed. Diversity is extremely important in all aspects of your startup. Attracting several angel investors from different backgrounds allows you to develop your business, with multiple safeguards in place. – Chris Barrett, PRserve
6. Con: Giving Away More of Your Business
Every person you bring in as an investor will want a piece of your business. That means the more people that come on board, the larger chunk of your company you are no longer in control of. While you get more money, it also means you will have a larger amount of equity to give away when it’s time to pay them back. – Peter Daisyme, Due Invoicing
7. Pro: Expanding Your Business Network
A pro to taking on multiple angel investors is the opportunity to expand your business network by acquiring new stakeholders who are incentivized by the positive performance of your business. The more investors you have, the larger your business network grows. – Dustin Cavanaugh, RenewAge
8. Pro: Increased Odds of Success
By utilizing more than one angel investor, you’re bringing double the years of experience, advice and guidance to your venture and vastly increasing your chances to succeed. According to a study done at Harvard Business School, businesses funded by angel investors are much more inclined to remain in business longer, experience substantial growth, and see a larger rate of return. – Anthony Pezzotti, Knowzo.com
9. Pro: Choosing One to Represent
All In my experience, angels can be active or passive, in that they want regular updates or are content with others actively managing the company. A pro I’ve found is having one lead angel who can speak for all others in a round, and who is interested and able to actively contribute in governance. They also must be credible and respected enough for other angels to take a back seat to them. – Hongwei Liu, mappedin
CATEGORY: Raising