What angel investing actually is

Angel investing means giving a very young, usually pre-profit company money to help it get off the ground, in exchange for a slice of ownership, called equity, in that company. The startup gets cash to hire, build, or grow, and the angel investor gets a stake that's worth something only if the company eventually succeeds.

This is fundamentally different from buying a share of a public company on an exchange. A public stock has a price you can check every second the market is open, and you can usually sell it within moments if you change your mind. A startup's shares have no daily price at all, since nobody is trading them minute to minute, and there is no simple button to sell and get your money back.

The failure rate is also far higher than almost anything a typical investor is used to. Most startups that take angel money never become big successes, and a large share fail outright and return nothing at all. Every lesson in this course builds on that one fact: angel investing isn't a slightly riskier version of stock picking, it's a different kind of bet with a different, harsher set of odds.

An investor puts ₱200,000 into a five-person startup building a new logistics app, receiving a small ownership stake in return. Unlike buying a bank stock the same afternoon, there's no app or ticker showing what that stake is worth tomorrow, and no way to sell it next week if the investor needs the cash back.