Since my goal was to learn without losing too much money, I generally made smaller investments. (and of course there are other people investing, so the total round could be $1M or more)
What kind of share did those investments generally get you?
On another note regarding the low amount of money, having someone like paul around is worth considering as extra value with the investment similar to when 37Signals took money from Jeff Bezos.
How low do you think its possible to go in terms of investing? As an experiment, lets say I decided to save up $1000 and try my hand as a venture capitalist. Do you think it could work out, or its pointless to even try because other costs, like administration time etc. would get in the way?
(Though I assume that friends and family rounds have some way around that, so maybe if you know someone that's looking for super-early investment, you could invest.)
But even so, from my limited knowledge (mostly drawn from reading stuff posted here) I think $25k is pretty much the least that people tend to invest.
10k is too small, really. It is mostly a way for me stay in the game. On one hand, startups have rejected that as an amount, wanting 25-50k. On the other hand, I have wanted to do my usual 25k and only bee able to get a 10k allocation.
The better the deal, the less I invest, paradoxically.
As jack... commented, you could invest as 'friends and family' round. I am not accredited investor. But I have made a few small investments up to 10k (I call them my pay it forward) to friends and close acquaintances with 'no pedigree' who are trying to start a business.
