Real-Life Angel Investing Returns 2012–2016
I disagree on the choice of benchmarks as they're not really comparable.  A more comparable benchmark for angel investments in Internet / SW startups would be a broad-based ETF that covers those.  Picking a couple of the larger ones, I looked at the same periods (2012-2019 and 2016-2019) for each of them:<p>FDN: 4.31x / 1.86x
IGV: 4.41x / 2.27x
overall mean:  3.2x<p>Not much different than QQQ's 3.04x, but SPY is not a good benchmark due to big differences in underlying constituents.<p>I'd want to get a better handle on the timing of investments as well to make the benchmark more comparable - e.g., if 50% of the capital was deployed in 2012 (hypothetically) and 10% in each of the following 5 years then I'd weight my benchmark performance in the same fashion.<p>Finally, I would want to discount the angel investment portfolio for lack of control and liquidity.  Much depends on the specifics of the recent fundraising - is the valuation using the pref figure or is it a reasonable approximation of the valuation of the seed paper (adjusting for structural differences)?<p>Personally, I'd rather have a well-diversified liquid ETF return of X than a portfolio of illiquid minority stakes that are marked to 1.2X.  At 2X, I'd be happy with the restrictions.<p>Please don't misinterpret this as dumping on the result - IMO I believe this to be an above-average outcome and I congratulate the author on their success.  Angel is harder than most if the top-few % of investments are not in a portfolio.