Mahi Sall, Advisor, Fintech-Bank Partnerships, Payments and Financial Inclusivity
January 25th, 2023
Mahi Sall is the CEO & Founder of FinXpair, a Berlin-based strategic advisory boutique firm focu[...]
How to get into angel investing with ‘no’ money
Sifted | Kim Fai Kok | Jul 15, 2021
Even if you don’t have a lot of capital to invest, you can start investing in companies just by giving your time, and gradually transition to investing with your money.
Four months ago, I stepped down after a decade at Swedish unicorn Truecaller to become a full-time angel investor. That’s something I never thought I’d do, especially considering I didn’t know what an angel investor was before joining a startup.
I was once intimidated by the idea of becoming an angel investor — and in particular by the thought of how much money I thought it required — like so many other people I talk to.
Sure, my experience at Truecaller has now given me capital to invest, but it’s possible to get into angel investing with a small amount of money — because that’s exactly what I did.
It all starts with learning
When I joined Truecaller in 2011 as employee number two, I had just graduated from university and had no clue what to expect from working in a startup. Back then, the ecosystem was not as developed as it is now, so finding advisors and people you could learn from was much harder before. However, I reached out to other companies, people and investors I looked up to from all over the world. I looked for the best people in their field — from finance, communications, product management to angel investing.
See: Advisors Seek Venture-Investing Gold in Fintech
I spent hours crafting personal notes about why I wanted to speak to them and what I wanted to learn. You’d be surprised how helpful people are as long as you’re genuine and are clear about what you need help with. (Of course respecting people’s time and learning when to accept a ‘No’ is also important!)
Those meetings made me a more confident operator and helped me build a strong network across the tech and startup community. This network is what helped me start to see dealflow for potential angel investments and get closer to founders.
Once you have a network, start investing your time
As I started to build up experience of my own, I stopped always being the person asking for advice. Instead, people started coming to me to exchange ideas.
No matter how busy I was, I carved out two to three hours per week to either help or learn from entrepreneurs and operators, be it over lunch, phone calls or walk-and-talks. These exchanges helped me get out of the day-to-day chaos of startup life, to reflect and collect my thoughts systematically.
See: AngelList Pioneers Rolling VC Funds in Pivot to SaaS
Along the way, I realised that the advice and encouragement that I gave to entrepreneurs I met is exactly what they look for with angel investors. Founders started to treat me as a trusted friend and advisor, someone they wanted to text or hop on a call with when they had a conundrum. And they introduced me to other founders. In short, by investing time, if not money, I had landed the kind of dealflow great angels have.
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