New York Angels

New York Angels is one of the longest-established angel groups in the United States and describes itself as New York's premier angel investment group. It is a membership organisation of accredited investors drawn from professionals, entrepreneurs, operators and industry specialists.

Who joins

The group assesses applicants on six things, and only the first is financial.

Members must be accredited investors under SEC rules. Beyond that, the group looks for a proven track record of building and running successful companies, and for connections to customers, industries and sources of capital. It explicitly welcomes applicants from all backgrounds and states that it seeks diversity of gender, ethnicity and economic background.

The remaining two criteria are about behaviour rather than credentials, and they are the ones that decide whether membership suits you.

How membership works

Applications go through an enquiry form on the group's site. Dues are not published, so the cost comes on application.

What is published, and what matters more, is the expectation. New York Angels calls angel investing a team sport and requires members to take an active part in screening and due diligence. It expects each member to actively invest and participate in at least one portfolio investment per year.

That is a real commitment and it is stated up front, which is to the group's credit. Angel groups depend on members doing unpaid diligence work on each other's behalf, and a group that lets passive members free-ride on that effort degrades quickly. If you want deal flow without doing the work, this is the wrong group and the requirement will surface that before you join rather than after.

What members get

Volume and terms. The group sees more than a thousand applications a year and puts 10 to 15 companies in front of members each month, which is a scale of deal flow no individual investor assembles alone.

Investing as a group also improves the terms. A syndicate negotiating together has leverage that a single angel writing a small cheque does not, and members get the benefit of that without doing the negotiating themselves.

The third benefit is the membership itself: an experienced network across many industries, which is what makes the diligence credible. When a company in a specialist field presents, the odds are good that somebody in the room has actually run one.

For a family office in the north east making direct early-stage investments, the combination of screened flow, shared diligence and improved terms is the argument. The annual investment requirement is the price of admission.