Ah, that’s where I’ve been going wrong all these years
Cubcrafters are having a public offering to raise funds. $400 minimum investment and I only skim read the rest of the sales waffle.
In fact I have lost 100% of every “small company investment” and of every startup regardless of whether listed or not
Quite. The only money I’ve invested that has really worked has been real estate – not to invest, but to live in, at least some of the time. Everything else has at best been ho-hum, at worst… bad.
I put quite a lot into my brother’s startup (biotech). The idea was, and still is, excellent. But then “professional management” came in and totally messed everything up. The shares still exist, but are worth less than 1% of what they cost. They would still have some value as a tax write-off, except that the company is so messed up that I can’t even get them to figure out how to sell the shares.
In IT startups, about which I know rather more than I wish I did, it goes exactly as Peter says. If you’re an “early investor” it’s pretty much guaranteed that you will get washed out when the VCs come in, if not on the first round then the second. You have got to get lucky in several different ways at once to make serious money that way.
