Aniruddha Malpani | Inc42
Some of my angel investments have been through angel networks, and since I am the lead investor, I serve on the Boards of these companies as a director, where I represent the interests of the other angel investors. This brings up all kinds of interesting dilemmas.
In the beginning, I used to be a fairly activist as an investor. I would share knowledge with the entrepreneurs, and send them lots of emails, with the hope that my insights would be useful to them.
Over the time, I realised that this had very little impact. They would politely acknowledge the emails, but it didn’t seem like they did anything differently based on them.
It finally dawned on me that my time was valuable, as was that of an entrepreneur.
Unless he felt that I could add value to his life, there was little point in my reaching out to him. In fact, by sending him lots of emails, I would actually perhaps be doing a disservice, because I would be distracting him from his major task of growing the company.
Yes, I am opinionated and do have my own point of view, but I felt that since he was in the trenches and had to deal with the company’s problems every single day, he was much more invested in making the company succeed as I was.
I felt it would make more sense to wait until he reached out to me, rather than proactively pushing information to him and telling him what to do.
My efforts to be helpful might end up back-firing, and he might be too polite to tell me this!
Source: Angel Investing Dilemmas – Mentor Or Micromanager? – Inc42 Media