"Find a couple of other older people with some experience and their own warchests, form an angel group. 200k will allow you to participate in like 4-5 good ideas within a year, and as an investor with good partners, you'll learn far faster than on the founder side. Founding is for people with no money, or people who've done it before. Money can buy you into the game in smarter ways. In particular it gives you the luxury of portfolio diversification which most founders lack.")
If you want to succeed in the startup game, a portfolio approach is best. That's possible for investors and employees (who can try several jobs until they find one that takes off), but not for founders, most of whom will spend years on a venture that likely doesn't go very far. So angel investing might be a better route.
Of course, that depends on how much you want to be playing the game yourself as a founder or just taking on an advisory role.
Heck, if you really want to ramp up your coding skills, I wouldn't mind tutoring you for a reasonable fee. Let me know if you're interested (email in my profile).
Idea sounds good but you need to make your own experience as an entrepreneur. As an angel you will get tons of good contacts and a general notion about upcoming trends and who is working on what, what ideas works and don't work but you don't know why because the information asymmetry between you and the founding teams is too strong—they don't tell you the entire story why something failed.
Being an angel on one or two ventures beside founding oneself is definitely a good way too make good contacts. But just being an angel could get boring and too abstract for somebody who haven't done it himself.
The advice to invest is terrible at this stage, closely akin to advising someone to buy after a significant a stock market rise. The underlying advice to get experience by some means other than founding your own startup might be wise, though. Not sure.
Great link, thank you. I did look into investing a little bit via angel.co, it did seem that in order to join their list, one either had to know someone, or have prior founder or angel investing experience. I really like the idea, purely from a learning standpoint, I would love to be even a silent partner if I was still offered the chance to sit in and learn.
I'm listed on angel.co as an accredited investor--I'd be happy to recommend you to get approved for an investor profile. I do early stage deals for an impact investment fund, specifically around news and information; glad to talk about how we work and evaluate deals (most are in emerging/frontier markets, but some in the US, too) and if there's anything you could participate in. My email address is on my profile page.
(cf Venkatesh Rao's answer to this question: http://www.quora.com/Startups/I-want-to-start-a-tech-startup...
"Find a couple of other older people with some experience and their own warchests, form an angel group. 200k will allow you to participate in like 4-5 good ideas within a year, and as an investor with good partners, you'll learn far faster than on the founder side. Founding is for people with no money, or people who've done it before. Money can buy you into the game in smarter ways. In particular it gives you the luxury of portfolio diversification which most founders lack.")
If you want to succeed in the startup game, a portfolio approach is best. That's possible for investors and employees (who can try several jobs until they find one that takes off), but not for founders, most of whom will spend years on a venture that likely doesn't go very far. So angel investing might be a better route.
Of course, that depends on how much you want to be playing the game yourself as a founder or just taking on an advisory role.
Heck, if you really want to ramp up your coding skills, I wouldn't mind tutoring you for a reasonable fee. Let me know if you're interested (email in my profile).