How to Be an Angel Investor
http://www.paulgraham.com/angelinvesting.html

When we sold our startup in 1998 I thought one day I'd do some angel investing. Seven years later I still hadn't started. I put it off because it seemed mysterious and complicated. It turns out to be easier than I expected, and also more interesting. The part I thought was hard, the mechanics of investing, really isn't. You give a startup money and they give you stock. You'll probably get either preferred stock, which means stock with extra rights like getting your money back first in a sale, or convertible debt, which means (on paper) you're lending the company money, and the debt converts to stock at the next sufficiently big funding round.

nor tactical advantages to using one or the other. The paperwork for convertible debt is simpler. But really it doesn't matter much which you use. Don't spend much time worrying about the details of deal terms, especially when you first start angel investing. That's not how you win at this game. When you hear people talking about a successful angel investor, they're not saying "He got a 4x liquidation preference." They're saying "He invested in Google."

How to Be an Angel Investor

Notes from Paul Graham on angel investing. Actually pretty interesting. The key, as he describes it, is to pick the right companies... the terms you get when investing don't matter much and can even hurt your chances of success if you're strict enough.

Larry Cheng: So, here’s a more difficult than expected attempt at pulling together a global directory of blogs written by current VCs. To help put the blogs in some context, they are ranked by their # of Google Reader subscribers. In addition, some blogs despite having subscribers have not posted in 3 months and they are denoted by an *. This directory will be updated quarterly highlighting any new blogs and the movers/shakers based on subscriber growth. If you don’t have the time to sort through all of the blogs, I will write a bi-weekly summary highlighting the “best VC blog posts” from the VCs in this directory.

List of top VC blogs. Look through and add to my reader.

Most advice to entrepreneurs focuses on what they should do: build a great product, assemble a great team, provide great service. All are “duhisms.” Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs don’t realize that there are things they should specifically avoid doing too. These are also duhisms, but somehow no one ever talks about them. Here is my list of the twelve most important things that entrepreneurs should not do.

HT: Chuck Smith

VC blogs

top venture capitalist blogs. One of which is Guy Kawasaki

A very unique type of investment

In Bloomington, IN, the SproutBox team is taking four startups at a time and pumping around a quarter of a million dollars into each one over the course of ten months. In addition to all that mouth-watering lettuce, the 'Box is also investing teams and resources. Although they just launched this year, they plan to start a new cycle every three months. How They Invest: SproutBox gives funding and resources in exchange for equity. Startups They've Helped: DecideAlready, CheddarGetter

Try and make sense of this