David S. Rose and Reid Hoffman – Angel Investing: The Gust Guide to Making Money and Having Fun Investing in Startups

The Official Gust Guide to Angel Investing will be the first complete, up to date, guide to the subject, including what angel investing is, how one gets started, how to find deal flow, evaluate opportunities, negotiate terms, join an angel group, structure investments, work with venture capital funds, and, of course, use the Gust platform to do all of the above.

The initial target audience is the 7,000,000+ plus people in the US who qualify as “accredited investors”, because they have incomes over $200K or assets of over $1m. These are the people who are legally allowed to invest in private companies. A secondary market are the 33,000,000 “mass affluent’ in the US who are potential participants in the equity crowd-funding industry passed by Congress in the JOBS Act of 2012. Follow-on audiences are similarly situated people in every other country (Gust currently supports accredited investors in 75 countries and six languages, and is the official platform of the national angel investment federations in sixteen countries, from the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and France, to Brazil, Russia, India and China.)

The audience will be interested in this book because angel investing has exploded during the past decade, from a tiny niche to the subject of mainstream coverage in every newspaper, magazine and movie. Every year angels invest over $20 billion into startup companies in the US alone (probably double worldwide). “Friends and Family” investors, and other in the mass affluent category annually invest over $60 billion into startup companies. Historically this been a virtually random activity, but over the past several years the Gust platform has now helped to make this a legitimate part of the Alternative Investments asset class, as noted in Bob Rice’s Book The Alternative Answer.