The Burden of Being Right - Confessions of a European Angel Investor

Pre-order - 34% off. Expected shipment: end of November.

You made money. You know business. How hard can investing be?
Congratulations. Someone will shortly offer you a terrible startup investment.

Or you are the founder about to ask for money, and you would like to know what the person across the table is really thinking. Either way, this book is for you.

Eighteen years as a business angel. Seventy-three startups. Five exits that paid for everything. Investors in his first investment company got 5.7 times their money back. A personal annualized return of more than 30 percent.

In The Burden of Being Right, Nicolaj Højer confesses what most investors leave out: his twenty losses, the stupid decisions, and the calculations behind the returns. He explains which founders to back, which business angels and VCs to trust, which lemmings to ignore, when to sell, and when to shut up and wait.

The five burdens

• Part 1: The Mirror - why private markets are rigged, why your current process is garbage, and why we must publicly autopsy your self-esteem before building anything useful.
• Part 2: The Founders - how to find the extraordinary founders the market misprices and avoid the narcissists and liars it happily funds.
• Part 3: The Lemmings - how co-investors lead you off cliffs while calling themselves "contrarian," and how to use their signals without catching their stupidity.
• Part 4: Sitting on Your Ass - how to survive ten years of nothing without running out of money, nerve, or time before the exits arrive.
• Part 5: Living with What You've Become - the board seats that imprison your ego, the fund you will be tempted to raise, and the day your reputation becomes a risk to everyone following it.

Contains: 73 startups. 20 funerals. 5 miracles. 1 God complex.
Side effects may include: less FOMO, more self-suspicion, awkward questions, and fewer expensive friendships.

Warning from the editor

Nicolaj is great at many things. Being subtle and sophisticated is not among them. When he first sent me this manuscript, I took it upon myself to save him from himself. I cut the worst jokes and softened the most deranged stories. He responded by doubling down on the jokes and calling me a coward in print. He is also right all the time, which is the part I find professionally irritating, and he proves it by showing you his numbers, including the ugly ones. In the end, we compromised. The jokes stay as he wrote them, and I get this page.
- Nick Traulsen, Editor

Softcover. Pre-orders ship first. Expected shipment: end of November. The 34% pre-order price disappears the day the book goes on general sale. Ships from Denmark. Free shipping in Denmark, €9.90 in the EU, €19.90 for the rest of the world.