The invisible returns of business angels

Column by Valéry Bollier Impact Business Angels November 12, 2026 3:58 p.m. The performance of a business angel is not measured solely by its financial performance. Investing in a start-up provides three often invisible benefits.

Becoming a Business Angel means investing: your capital, your network, your time, the fruit of an entire career. Then, over the course of the committees, the roundtables and the hard knocks shared with the founders, we discover that the adventure brings in much more than what we invested in it: returns that no dashboard measures.

For those who have built or run a business, the frail skiff of the beginning has often ended up becoming a ship. The maps are better, and each year sinking seems less likely. We do not regret the storm, but what it revealed: it swept away the superfluous and gave victories a flavor that good weather does not know.

This intoxication, for example, we found alongside NOLT. This Nice brand dresses sports clubs and has a founding project: the Infini Jersey, a jersey that you rent instead of buying and which, when worn, becomes the material for the next one. a few days before the closing of his fundraising, an investor withdraws. This is the watershed that every entrepreneur fears: the tower is threatened, and the project with it.

So we solicit our network, one call after another. The NOLT team absorbs the shock and returns to battle with a courage that commands admiration. Together, we put the episode behind us and the first Infinis Jerseys saw the light of day. On that day, we rediscover the primitive joy of those who know that they will see the next day, without having to start our own lives again.

to our children, we bequeath our values, our heritage, our view of the world. Rarely what thirty years of work have taught us. A network of seventy Business Angels represents more than a thousand years of professional life serving startups. When faced with a problem that seems immense, someone has almost always faced it before.

One day, the partners of one of our gems go through a crisis. Axel Paugam, who founded our network with the support of the SOS Group of which he is today financial director, urgently boards a train. Its experience of shareholder agreements does the rest: dialogue resumes, and serenity returns.

And the transmission goes in both directions. We bring the memory of the world we knew; they open to us the doors of the one who arrives. We pass on experience to them. They transmit to us the future.

At twenty years old, many of us wanted to succeed in order to change something in the world. Then came responsibilities, compromises, and this ideal sometimes fell asleep. By the time we finally have the means to act, we have sometimes forgotten what we wanted to do with them.

Entrepreneurs remind us of this. All it takes is a cocktail prepared by the Biscornu teams, where all the kitchen staff are disabled, to once again believe that everyone deserves to shine. You just have to see boxes at Carton Vert that were promised to go to the dumpster returning to service to remember that nothing is ever completely lost.

We may no longer build the companies that will transform tomorrow ourselves, but we can help those who build them. Capital then ceases to be immobile wealth: it once again becomes a moving force, capable of bringing an idea into reality.

Not all crossings arrive at port, and everyone knows this when boarding. But reducing what a Business Angel earns to the multiple achieved at exit is only judging the destination. Long before her, the journey has already brought encounters, battles, victories, and this rare feeling of no longer looking at the future from the shore.

Our contribution was often modest. But each time a fragile company continues its path, whether it is called NOLT, Biscornu, Carton Vert or one of the twenty-four others in which we have invested, we understand that we have not only helped to write its history.

Machine-translated from French