Otherwise know as making investments in areas where you actually know something about the industry, market, and users.

Continuing the theme of summarizing from Silicon Valley - one of last week's memes was 'Angel List makes it too easy for investors to "Spray and Pray" ' . Dave McClure (Master of 500 Hats) is a founding partner at 500 Startups, an internet startup seed fund and incubator program in Mountain View. His post from yesterday collects links, and explains with typical Dave attitude why value added investment is important, and why a background in engineering, building products, marketing, getting customers and revenue is something investors should have.

".. a quantitative, high-volume investment strategy filtered based on reasonable assessment of team, product, market, customer & revenue along with domain-specific expertise, and selective follow-on investment with incremental knowledge of company metrics and progress CAN result in good outcomes.

or at least i hope so, because that's what i'm doing."

Posted here because we agree strongly with this thesis, and are making domain specific expertise available to people who understand that they need it.

References
http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2011/02/brief-thoughts-on-angel-list...

Also relevant http://www.cunningsystems.com/2011/02/y-combinator-makes-news

Cunning Systems evaluates product and service ideas in computing and communications. If you would like to discuss an idea, contact us at info@cunningsystems.com