When I joined Brisbane Angels in 2013, the pitch meetings were a lottery. Some companies were genuinely good. Many were not. And sometimes, there were no pitches at all. Fortunately, it wasn’t all about the work; the dinners were enjoyable and a chance to catch up with people who have become good friends.

Brisbane Angels is a broad church. It’s part work, part play, and united by an entrepreneurial spirit. We all share an interest in technology and ideas, and some imagination for the future. It’s a not-for-profit, run by volunteers, and everyone is a contributor. I initially thought my contribution could be ‘deal flow’. I came from financial markets, having set up Citigroup’s ECM business in Australia, so finding and assessing deals was the thing I knew how to do. Besides, what else was I going to do in semi-retirement? I don’t like golf or sailing enough, and I’ve always loved looking at deals and markets and how they interact with the real and political economy.

Working the supply side

So, I got to work on the supply side. I became proactive about sourcing. I met members of other angel groups and early-stage VCs, got involved in mentoring across the ecosystem, sat in on accelerators, joined the screening process. I coached founders on how to pitch on the night; not because I enjoyed it all that much, but because I didn’t want to waste a room full of busy people’s time on a deck that buried the problem on slide nine.

As a not-for-profit membership organisation, we were encouraged to bring guests as potential members. But when the pitch night was hit and miss, I was reluctant to invite anyone. You don’t bring a friend to a show that might not have a performer. It’s a matter of “flow begets flow”, a concept I learnt from the man who taught me ECM. Doing deals is how you get more deals. More deals bring more investors into the room. More investors mean more capital, which attracts better companies, which produces better deals. It compounds, slowly, if you keep feeding it.

It was a grind, years of unglamorous work by a lot of volunteers, but overtime the ecosystem matured and the deal flow improved. One good pitch a night became two, then three. Early on, the test was simply “is this a good pitch?” Then it became “will this raise money?” Today I like to think Brisbane Angels puts up three good, investible pitches on a typical night. This didn’t exist in 2013. That’s fantastic growth and something I am proud of. But I want more.

Still not happy

Let’s be honest about why we can do better. Of perhaps 30 investible companies pitched a year to Brisbane Angels, only about half get funded. As a source of investible deal flow, that puts us among the best in Australia. But what was stopping the other 15 companies from sealing the deal? Admittedly, back in 2013, I’d only made a few investments. There were fewer opportunities available and I was wrapping my head around angel investing. Truth be known, it was the social side that kept me engaged.

In today’s environment, the real issue now is taking the first step.

Some members come along, decide angel investing isn’t for them, and leave. That’s a completely reasonable conclusion. Plenty of others want to invest and simply never take the step. They get involved in the process, watch and learn for a year, and then quietly drift away without ever writing a cheque.

For a long time, the constraint in angel investing was deal flow. In 2013, you couldn’t build a diversified portfolio because there weren’t enough investible deals to diversify across. You picked winners, and picking winners is hard. Most people were rightly daunted.

It’s not 2013 anymore. That constraint is largely gone now. The new constraint is investor participation.

Why theory doesn’t fix it

I spent a few years trying to fix the participation problem with education. At various Brisbane Angels conferences I gave talks on how I think about angel investing: diversification, reading deals, top-down themes, due diligence. For a time, it seemed to help. The group found its stride and started making more but smaller investments, which is the right direction. When Brian and I set up MooCoo, we published this thinking as a quick start guide with a series of videos, a written guide, and a Monte Carlo simulation model that lets you see (in numbers) why a diversified angel portfolio behaves the way it does. A couple of hours to watch, read, and play with the model, plus a bit of time to digest, and you’re about as ready to invest as theory can make you. It’s free on the MooCoo website, and far better than a paid angel course.

I still stand by the education. But I’ve come to believe theory has a ceiling here, and the ceiling is lower than I’d like.

No amount of reading prepares you for writing your first cheque. I’ve written a lot of them, and I can tell you the first one feels like incinerating money. So did the few after it until I could feel a winner brewing somewhere in the portfolio. That’s the deal you’re making: you hand over capital to companies that will probably fail, on the understanding that one day a different company might pay for all of them. I’ve laid it out in Roll the Die, where the whole argument is that you need something closer to 25 or 30 shots, not three. But knowing the maths and feeling comfortable striking the match are different things. The best way to learn angel investing is to do it. There’s no substitute.

So, the rule of thumb I landed on, for anyone asking me where to start, is roughly this: you could do a lot worse than backing the best deal you see each month. Do that and you’ll have eight to ten investments in a year, which is a real start on a portfolio. It’s commentary, not advice, but it’s the shape of how I’d think about it.

Angelmatic gives momentum and keeps it going

I now think there’s an even better answer than my monthly rule of thumb, and it’s called Angelmatic.

Angelmatic is the product that automates all of this, and it’s used by both Brisbane Angels and the MooCoo syndicate. It’s run quietly inside Brisbane Angels since 2019, and this is the formal launch to MooCoo syndicate investors. The idea is simple. You give one instruction. From a $10,000 commitment, Angelmatic invests $1,000 into each of the next ten qualifying deals, and then you’re done. You decide the size of the cheque: $10,000 or $20,000 to start for most people, and some who can afford it might put $50,000 to $100,000 to work across the next ten deals. You don’t have to be in the room. You don’t have to pick.

The word “qualifying” is doing the real work. Angelmatic doesn’t invest in everything. It only invests when there’s already genuine conviction from the members, such as several members putting in real money on the same terms, at the same time, with no single investor dominating the round. In other words, it rides alongside the deals that real angels have already decided to back with their own capital. The discipline that took me years to internalise is built into the product. Diversify, stay in cadence, don’t over-concentrate. It’s all there and working for you.

It also handles the part nobody talks about: the admin. You’re notified of each investment by a paid invoice, with monthly statements, and an annual statement your accountant will thank you for. This doesn’t reduce you to simply being a passenger. You become a real beneficial shareholder in each company, receiving the shareholder updates and voting requests, watching the highs and lows unfold like any other investor. You set it to auto-renew for the next ten deals, or not. Residual balances get returned. You set the instruction once and the rest happens for you.

Who Angelmatic is for. Yes, that includes me

For a beginner, Angelmatic takes most of the fear out of the first cheque and replaces it with a boost of confidence. A thousand dollars across ten deals doesn’t feel like incinerating money the way one larger cheque into one company does. Think of it as training wheels. Run it for a year and you’ll have a diversified portfolio and a year of watching how these companies behave. Then you can take the wheels off and start choosing for yourself. When you do, the framework I use is in If I Can’t Articulate Why It Will Fail. Or you can keep using Angelmatic. Both are fine.

Here’s the part I want to be straight about. I don’t use Angelmatic myself. I invest in most Brisbane Angels deals, albeit the slow way. Deal by deal, by hand, because I enjoy it and I have the time. But I built the product I’d switch to the day that stops being true. If I went away for a year, or got time-poor for any reason, I wouldn’t drop out of the cadence and lose the flow I spent a decade building. I’d put it on Angelmatic and stay in the game.

That, to me, is the test of a product. Would the person who runs an angel group use it themselves? Under the right conditions, yes and without hesitation. It’s a product for beginners taking their first nervous step, and it’s a product for experienced angels who want to keep going when life gets in the way. The discipline is the product. Angelmatic just makes sure it survives a busy year.

Richard Moore — MooCoo Ventures

Richard Moore is co-founder of MooCoo Ventures, an angel syndicate that co-invests alongside Brisbane Angels, one of Australia’s most active angel groups. He has made over ninety personal angel investments since 2013.

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