Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups—Timeless Advice from an Angel Investor Who Turned $100,000 into $100,000,000 by Jason Calacanis

Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups—Timeless Advice from an Angel Investor Who Turned $100,000 into $100,000,000 by Jason Calacanis

Chapter 1: Someone Else Was Supposed to Write This Book

This book has a singular goal: to teach you how massive wealth is created in
the twenty-first century.
It’s not a system or a secret, so I’m not going to build this up into
something fancy like those bullshit self-help books you’ve already bought.
I’m just gonna tell you how a C-minus student from Brooklyn (before
Brooklyn was cool) clawed his way into the tech industry, got lucky seven
times (and counting), and made tens of millions of dollars.
Most folks think I’m lucky, some say I’m a complete fraud, and a handful
think I’m a brilliant hype man, and I don’t agree with any of them—I agree
with all of them.
That’s why this will be the greatest business book ever written. I shouldn’t
be the one writing it, yet here we are. I’m the outsider who made it in, letting
you know how he pulled it off.
I am as shocked as anyone I made it here, and it’s a hell of a story: the son
of a nurse and bartender watches his family lose everything when the feds—
wearing raid jackets just like in the movies—burst in with shotguns to take
back his dad’s bar. He crosses the bridge to Manhattan with something to
prove and, ultimately, he heads to the West Coast to make his fortune.

The American Dream
The American Dream still exists, it’s just not as widely distributed.
Our parents and grandparents took factory and white-collar jobs and rode
them for all they were worth in the last century. Now the robots—who never
sleep and self-improve on an exponential curve—are taking these jobs.
Meanwhile, we humans, with our nagging physiological and emotional needs,
struggle to keep up.
Most of you are screwed.
But you’re here, so you’re clearly willing to learn and I can radically
improve your odds if you do the work.
The world is becoming controlled by the few, powerful, and clever people
who know how to create those robots, or how to design the software and the
tablet on which you’re reading this. But please don’t stop reading, because
I’m going to show you how anyone can get a seat at the table with the
digerati, illuminati, and moneyrati and, perhaps, tap into this hundred-year
boom.
Yeah, I’ve got my own formula like those other business books you’ve
bought, but there is a major difference between my formula and theirs—mine
is forward-looking.
All of the other books out there, and some are great, try to explain to you
how people made money in real estate, by mastering the art of the deal or by
getting the right people on the bus (and the wrong ones off), but they are
largely historical documents now.
The world has changed more in the last ten years than it did in the last ten
decades.
That’s not just some clever one-liner to say in a conference keynote or at a
dinner party. It’s an undebatable fact.
The changes we’ve seen with the internet, with mobile phones, with
robotics, with sensors, and in biology are mind-blowing not just to civilians,
but also to the people working in these fields—and the pace is increasing.
I could give you a list of mind-blowing breakthroughs to prove my point
about how fast things are moving, but I’d like this book to stand the test of
time, and the truth is that giving you examples like a computer beating a
human at chess, or an encyclopedia made with no paid writers, or computers
flying airplanes and cars without steering wheels, or wars being won with
robots, are so commonplace that science fiction is having a hard time
remaining, well, fiction.
I know because the top-tier investors who invested in the last fifty big

Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups—Timeless Advice from an Angel Investor Who Turned $100,000 into $100,000,000 by Jason Calacanis