When Indu Navar, chief executive of Serus, needed an angel investor for her software startup in 2001, she turned to the most obvious place to find it: her own community. She met Ronjon Nag, a handwriting recognition software pioneer at a wireless technology event hosted by The IndUS Entrepreneurs, a nonprofit networking group. Nag promised her $100,000 after she landed her first customer. "You don't even know me," Navar recalls telling Nag. Not a problem for Nag, who knew Navar by ...