Silicon Valley miracle midwife: Angel Investor as a pioneering mentor

In the Silicon Valley angel investor group has such a group of investors, they are not only the start-up of the "investment money", and will be more proactive to help entrepreneurs entrepreneurial, in fact, play the role of "entrepreneurial mentor." These "entrepreneurial instructors" are not mysterious, and their common feature is the transformation from successful technology entrepreneurs. Apple's angel investor Maik Makula, for example, was an early founder of Intel, and Google's Angel investor, co-founder of Andy Betholsheim, was the first Hoffman to invest in Facebook, the founder of LinkedIn. This is not accidental or coincidental, the transformation from entrepreneur to investor itself is part of the most important innovation cycle in Silicon Valley, which makes the valuable entrepreneurial experience accumulated in practice not lost by the successful "retirement" of the entrepreneur, and can be Shing. They play the following roles: Angel investors as "entrepreneurial mentors" help start-ups choose their technology routes. The founders of High-tech start-ups typically start with original technology, which is a long way from meeting market demands, and entrepreneurs have a lot of development work to do.　　In the process, angel investors with technological entrepreneurial experience can offer advice on both the market and technology to help start-ups find the most appropriate technical route. As "entrepreneurial mentor" angel investors can provide business management advice to help shape the corporate culture. Angel investors as "entrepreneurial mentors" push start-ups to form business models. In fact, it is a long process for big companies that change the world to look for business models when they start out, whether it's Cisco, Intel, Google or Facebook, which has been exploring a successful business model for many years.　　But in the process, there is often a "first push" from angel investors. Angel investors as "entrepreneurial mentors" can provide a wide range of contacts and goodwill to start-ups. Start-ups often lack basic "credit" and cognitive skills in addition to technology. and the reputation and experience of successful angel investors is the most important signal to guide the market to judge start-ups, which is an intangible asset injected by angel investors far more important than investment.　　At the same time, successful angel investors will also actively promote their investment in the network among the enterprise or entrepreneurial team, which in fact for many young entrepreneurs to build a business network to expand the shortcut. Successful angel investment has also brought amazing benefits to the "entrepreneurial mentor". In general, Angel investment is the highest risk, according to statistics, the majority of angel investment income is dismal. But as the experience of these "entrepreneurial mentors" grows, the success rate of the companies that have been invested has soared. For example, in the 12 years of Rohn Kangwei Angel Investment, more than 500 investment projects, including the heavyweight Google, Facebook, Twitter and so on. The failure rate of the project in 1997-2001 years is 77%, 2002 years after the lossThe rate of failure is 40%, the entrepreneurial success rate of series entrepreneurs is 66%.　　If a broad range of angel Investments is a social foundation for Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, a handful of "entrepreneurial mentors" in the angel investment community are "midwives" of the Silicon Valley miracle. ("Silicon Valley network of Zhongguancun Connections" was published in April 2012 by Tsinghua University Press)