> Some early-stage startups that try to court you will instead take a $10k check on the spot as an early investment. How often are you seeing these deals? In

> Some early-stage startups that try to court you will instead take a $10k check on the spot as an early investment. How often are you seeing these deals? In my experience, any company raising in increments of $10K is really only doing so as a way to get people invested (literally) so they can continue to hit them up for funding, connections, and networking later on. $10K doesn’t really go very far in terms of paying employees. Of course that’s fine if it works out that way, but I’ve also seen companies who gather $10K from every random person who can invest end up with some wacky cap tables, which becomes a turnoff to future investors. This creates weird situations where they put a lot of pressure on buying people out of their investments just to clean up the cap table. Again, could be fine for a quick turnaround but it’s not quite the same as investing for the long term. And then there’s the fact that most angel investments are just going to go to zero, but that’s the nature of the game.