Academic Angels Focus on Former Students

Increasingly, I have noticed that more and more entrepreneurship professors are making angel investments. That got me wondering: Do academics approach angel investing in a different way than non-academics?

To answer this question, I queried some members of the entrepreneurship division of the Academy of Management – a group of business school professors who teach and research entrepreneurship – that make angel investments about their approach. For the most part, I found that academic angels approach the process very similarly to other angels. There was one big difference: academic angels tend to focus their investments on their former students.

Academic Angels Focus on Former Students