Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background.

What should I look at before investing in a start-up?
Previous answers have done a great job with the "Should I invest?" question.   One thing you may be overlooking is the question "Am I allowed to invest?" For most offerings of stock in a startup, investors are required to be accredited by the SEC's definition.  See this helpful quora post for more information on requirements to invest in startups. To be honest, if a startup is looking for investors to put in "a few thousand dollars" each, this would raise my alarm bells.  The cost and hassle of the paperwork to (legitimately) issue shares in that small of number would lead me just to use a credit card to keep me going until I was able to raise a larger amount of capital.