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…