Every year in America, over 600,000 new businesses start up and hire their first employees. Many will fail, but some of them will become the legendary businesses of the future, transforming industries and making millions for the angel investors who helped fund them in their early days. Angel investing, once the exclusive province of multi-millionaire high-rollers, has now entered the mainstream, with more than $20 billion being invested annually by individual investors in the US alone. Contrary to popular belief, access to these high risk/high return investments—and success in startup investing—doesn’t have to be a matter of luck or connections. Angel Investing: The Gust Guide to Making Money & Having Fun Investing in Startups shows how smart investors with the right strategy and a long-term perspective can achieve annual returns of 25 percent or more from a well-designed angel portfolio.

Written by David S. Rose, the founder of Gust—the global platform that powers the world of organized professional angel investing—Angel Investing is a comprehensive, entertaining guide that walks readers through every step of the way to becoming a successful angel investor. It is illustrated with stories from among the 90+ companies in which David has invested during a 25 year career as one of the world’s most active business angels and includes instructions on how to get started, how to find and evaluate opportunities, and how to pursue and structure investments to maximize your returns.

From building your reputation as a smart investor, to negotiating fair deals, adding value to your portfolio companies and helping them implement smart exit strategies, David provides both the fundamental strategies and the specific tools you need to take full advantage of this rapidly growing asset class. He details the advantages of joining an angel group, explains how seed and venture funds can help leverage an investor’s resources, and reveals how recent regulatory changes and new online platforms are making startup investing accessible to millions of Americans.

Making money is no longer about sitting back and reading stock listings, David says. It is now about being part owner of an exciting startup that can be fun and financially rewarding. Angel Investing teaches investors how to carefully select and manage investments, establish a long term view, and approach angel investing as a serious part of an alternative asset portfolio while also enjoying being an integral part of an exciting new venture.

DAVID S. ROSE is a serial entrepreneur, Inc 500 CEO and one of the world’s most active angel investors. Described by Forbes as “New York’s Archangel,” by BusinessWeek as a “world conquering entrepreneur,” and by Red Herring as “patriarch of Silicon Alley”, David has founded or funded over 90 high tech companies. He is the founder and CEO of Gust, the international collaboration platform for startup financing used by over 50,000 accredited angel investors, 1000 angel groups and venture capital funds, and 250,000 entrepreneurs. Gust received the SIIA CODiE Award for Best Collaboration Solution in both 2012 and 2013, as well as the 2012 SWIFT/Innotribe Award as the world’s most innovative financial technology company.

David is also Managing Partner of Rose Tech Ventures, an early stage angel fund; Founder and Chairman Emeritus of New York Angels, the most active angel group in America; and Associate Founder and Founding Track Chair for Finance, Entrepreneurship and Economics at Singularity University, the Google/NASA-sponsored post-graduate program in exponential technologies. A native New Yorker, David has a BA from Yale University, an MBA in Finance from Columbia Business School, and a D. Eng. h.c. from Stevens Institute of Technology.