» My response to @bryce crying about @anglelist Calacanis. Why I Deleted My AngelList Account. Yesterday I deleted my AngelList account. Doing so generated a lot of questions on Twitter, in email and from the press so I want to explain myself. Its a decision I’ve been wrestling with for the last few months as I’ve found the service increasingly not matching my investment philosophy. That’s not to say the service isn’t a valuable one for entrepreneurs or even certain kinds of investors. I believe that it can be. For those not familiar, AngelList’s promise is an interesting one- connect entrepreneurs to an increasingly large base of angel and venture investors while simultaneously exposing those investors to a stream of dealflow that’s been vetted by the AngelList team.
Its not the emails, the companies or the filtering AngelList does that isn’t a fit for me it’s the investment style they espouse that finally pushed me to press delete on my account. Though there may be more depth to it, I thought this quote from Naval sums up their investment style pretty well: AngelList Takes Angel Investing To Warp Speed - Tomio Geron - Social Markets. Why I Won’t Game AngelList. I think AngelList is awesome and I’m a huge fan of what they’ve done.
Nivi wrote a great post celebrating their 1.5 year anniversary today: 1.5 Years Of AngelList: 8000 Intros, 400 Investments And That’s Just The Data We Can Tell You About. One of the powerful constructs of AngelList is social proof. It’s become an important part of the seed / early stage venture process as very early stage investors pile into companies that their friends, or people they respect, are investing in. AngelList does a nice job of exposing and promoting social proof during the fundraising process in a way that is both legal and non-offensive. However, as one would expect, entrepreneurs focus on taking advantage of every opportunity they have.
As a result, I’ve been getting a request on a daily basis to either “follow” or be listed as an “endorser” for various companies. These requests fall into two categories: (a) people I know and am trying to be helpful to and (b) random people. Startups: How to Hustle with AngelLis... by Brendan Baker. AngelList. What’s The Real Deal With AngelList? Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (@msuster), a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners.
Read more about Suster at Bothsidesofthetable There’s lots of discussion out there about a new and much-loved service called AngelList that connects entrepreneurs to angel investors. I was reluctant to write about AngelList because the debate on pros / cons is pretty nuanced. But with some heat flying I felt it worthwhile to give anybody on the sidelines a better understanding of the issues. Bryce Roberts, a person whose opinion and judgment I greatly respect as well as a person I consider of high integrity has gone on record as having “deleted his AngelList account.” You should read this post. It is thoughtful and respectful.Shervin Pishevar, another person who I respect wrote the following on Twitter, “Saying you don’t like @AngelList is like saying you don’t like Email. Where do I stand on AngelList? 1. I have no reason to delete my account. 2. 3. 4. 5. I feel angels need:
AngelList. AngelList. “The easiest way to become a millionaire is to start off a billionaire and go into the airline business.” – Richard Branson Summary: Every investor uses social proof to filter dealflow; Ron Conway has a fund that uses social proof as the sole investment criterion. Angels should almost do more homework than a professional VC would—VCs invest other people’s money while angels invest their own. We should all be thankful that we live in a world in which VCs exist. Finally, the accelerating returns on innovation means that all of the value in the public markets will be shrunk and put in the hands of startups. I’m not an investor. And maybe that’s a good thing. Naval has a personal investment philosophy that he uses for his own investments—it’s focused and it has nothing to do with social proof. On Social Proof Almost every investor uses social proof to filter dealflow. If social proof is a good filter, is it also a good investment strategy?
On Angels On VCs On Startups Startup valuations are up.