nivi

Last time we got this comment, we checked the #'s and leads put in 16% of the investment on average.

Compare that to 1-5% for a typical VC fund. Partners in a VC fund also take out 10-20% of the fund in management fees.

You can learn more here https://angel.co/economics-syndicates

Some leads have low skin in the game. In that case, you can always opt out of their investments. Or invest in our funds and we'll make the decision for you (for no additional cost) http://angel.co/funds

P.S. We don't hate VCs. They are among our users and customers.

The fund invests in a subset of syndicated deals. About half of them historically. The investment team consists of experienced investors including Naval (my co-founder). Details here https://angel.co/access-fund

The real story is 46% unrealized returns on 2013 syndicate investments. Which is in the upper top quartile of VC.

And A-List, a premium recruiting product for busy companies. That complements our free recruiting product with 180K active candidates.

Down markets are a good time to invest, but we're not anticipating one.

http://angel.co/returns http://alist.co

Yes, thanks and fixed. :-)

We call them “1-man startups” internally. Hence the title. =) Actual 1-person startups are an interesting topic too, for a future post.

Hey, this is Nivi from AngelList. Please let me know if you have any questions. And please keep the comments coming. We are iterating on it right now.

The small investors are grouped together into a fund. So the startup only sees one new entry on the cap table. The overhead is the same as adding a single large investor to the round.

More details here http://angel.co/help/invest.

Let me know if you have any more questions.

Here's the AngelList take on why you want to avoid general solicitation and non-accredited investors https://angel.co/help/regulations#gs

Nivi from AngelList here. Please me know if you have any questions.

Yep, it is startups with 10+ intros only. We get about 100 startup profiles a day.

We built references to help solve this problem. You can get references from anyone and their followers will be notified. You should only ask for references from people you already know well. We ban people who spam investors (or anyone), asking for references. We're also working on other tools to help the disconnected get connected.

AngelList used to be like that but things have changed. =)

Most of the updates that investors receive are determined by who is involved in your company (advisors, investors, references) and the level of interest in your company (follows, intros). If you add people to your company over time, these notifications will still go out. So no need to have the ultimate profile when you publish -- I would still make it great though.

We still review every new startup because our algorithmic updates can't pick up every good startup. So your startup shouldn't look awful when you publish. If it looks promising, we'll ask you to ping us when you've made some progress. And, in any case, you can still ping us.

Totally agreed. And I didn't thank you for writing the post. So, thank you. =)

Hey, this is Nivi from AngelList. I am very happy for Stormpulse and I'm glad to answer any of your questions here.

A couple things:

1. We're getting out of the "gatekeeper" business as quickly as possible. Over 70% of the intros on the site are now driven by code and community -- not us. It took a lot longer than we thought it would. We're working on the remaining 30%.

2. We don't think of it as "applying" to AngelList any more. We think of it as creating a startup profile. Applications made sense when we reviewed and distributed every startup. Now startups create profiles and they live on AngelList well before and after they raise money. For example: http://angel.co/42-floors

We went through the terms and deleted the following:

DELETED: "We also have the right to invest in any business on the same terms as are offered to Investors, or on better terms if we are able to negotiate them with Entrepreneurs, and we have no obligation to make those investment opportunities available to anyone else."

It was dumb. We also made a few other changes. Let us know if you have any other feedback http://angel.co/terms

We've taken small allocations in a few investments on the site but we've had to talk our way into the deal like every other investor in the world.

The terms are still not perfect nor will they ever be. I would like to rewrite and simplify them one day but that might be wishful thinking.

Thanks to our counsel for the quick fixes. And thanks for the bug report.

Hey, this is Nivi from AngelList. That is a dumb clause. We are changing it. We will also look through the terms for other dumb clauses. I'll follow up on this thread with the revisions later today.

People submit bug reports to us all the time. This is the first time we've gotten a legal one. Thank you.

Hey Matthew, I don't see your pitch. Is the company name Stormpulse? Hit me up at nivi@venturehacks.com. Gracias.

This is Nivi from Venture Hacks and AngelList. I read the site a couple times a day, right after I read Techmeme. Bonjour.

Work at a Startup is a brilliant move and I'm looking forward to learning from it.

I don't agree that "usually startups in trouble end up dying, or getting bought in a fire sale." I don't know if anyone has a big enough data set to give us the "correct" answer.

But if you talk to thoughtful, experienced VCs and entrepreneurs who have seen many companies through their whole lifecycle (birth to IPO and beyond), I think they'll tell you that a lot of the successful startups get in significant trouble along the way. And if that trouble coincides with the need to raise a round, common stockholders get diluted.

Preferred stockholders have anti-dilution, pro rata rights, protective provisions, and cash reserves to protect them.

I also stupidly forgot to list YC as an investor. Fixed.

I thought I wrote the headline as "Facebook acquires AngelList startup". Maybe I made a mistake.

I'll monitor this thread and answer any questions you have about AngelList.

Dave Lifson, a Postling founder, describes the process from his point of view:

http://caterpillarcowboy.com/post/489762022/the-inside-story...

I wonder how we can circulate the good ones back into StartupList… can you let me know if you get past a first meeting?

Just to be super-clear, in his first sentence ("interesting companies"), Josh is talking about StartupList where we send hand-picked startups to investors.

In the second sentence ("pretty bad"), Josh is talking about AngelList where anyone can contact him directly.

Let me know if you write that post and I'll link to it. Thomas Korte (AngelList member) has his take here: http://thomaskorte.com/archive/how-to-cold-email

I've been surveying people on AngelList to see if they want to remove their e-mail address. So far, about 5 people have said "keep it" and 1 asked me to take it off.

Definitely check out Jason's OAF: http://openangelforum.com

We're also glad to intro good startups to angels: http://venturehacks.com/startuplist

Maybe it's really 'management engineering'. The application of science and math to the practice of building businesses.

We weren't clear about the definition of a "seller" in the Venture Hacks post. I'll revise to say something like,

"The seller doesn't have to be a "salesman" or "business guy". He can be technical, but he must be able to wield the tools of influence. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs aren't salesmen, but they are sellers."

Hey babycakes, consider adding "via @venturehacks" when you post our tweets.

I'm assuming you got it from us. Because we linked to it. And no one else on the web links to things.