About a year ago, Josh Felser, co-founder of the Web 1.0 era music service Spinner.com and more recently, online video service, Grouper, decided to forego being an entrepreneur and instead become an angel investor. He and David Samuel started San Francisco, Calif.-based firm, Freestyle Capital, which is well known for some high-profile investments such as Formspring and SimpleGeo.
Felser stopped by our office for a conversation about recent investing trends and the growing tension between angel investors and venture capitalists. In a freewheeling chat, he talked about the shortcomings of scattershot investing, startups pointlessly abusing the phrase “game mechanics” in their pitch decks and, most importantly, revealed a few things he believes start-ups should know.
Felser, who sold Spinner and Grouper for a total of over $ 350 million believes a good strategy for angel investing is “less is more,” for this allows him and Samuel to help the companies by focusing more of their energies on their investments. Especially as a recruiter-on-steroids for these companies.
More GigaOM video interviews with early stage investors:
- Brad Feld
- Dave McClure
- Keith Rabois
- Chris Dixon
- Chris Sacca
- Jeff Clavier
- Naval Ravikant
