Business Angels
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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.
Being on Angellist @ venturehacks.com , roughly tripled the amount of “pitch emails” that I usually get. It inspired me this post about how to contact me or anyone you don’t know and can’t get an introduction to. Here is the “cold-email” (as in cold-call) format that I find most useful when being approached.
» Angel Investor Tip: How to cold-email me (or anyone else) - Thomas Korte
Standby in 3 – 2 – 1: We are now live from San Francisco with TechCrunch Disrupt. If you can’t make the conference in person, you can still watch all the great panels, fireside chats, product launches, and the Startup Battlefield, plus a few surprises on TechCrunch TV . We’ll be webcasting the entire 3-day event and showing you all the action on the main stage. The guest list reads like a who’s who in Silicon Valley and the world of entrepreneurs.
Disrupt LIVE Webcast, Day One (TCTV)
It’s a bombshell. No, it’s a nuclear bomb. It speaks for itself.
Ron Conway Drops A Nuclear Bomb On The Super Angels [Email]
So A Blogger Walks Into A Bar…
Yesterday I was tipped off about a “secret meeting” between a group of “Super Angels” being held at Bin 38, a restaurant and bar in San Francisco. “Do not come, you will not be welcome,” I was told. So I did what any self respecting blogger would do – I drove over to Bin 38, parked my car and walked in. in the back of the restaurant in a private room was a long oval table.
“Jason McCabe Calacanis was CEO and co-founder of Weblogs, Inc., a network of widely read blogs including Engadget – ranked # 1 by Technorati, Joystiq, Autoblog, and Blogging Baby. Founded in January 2004, Weblogs, Inc. became a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL in November of 2005. Calacanis maintained editorial supervision over Weblogs, Inc. as a senior vice president of AOL. In June 2006, Calacanis relaunched Netscape, the iconic browser owned by AOL and was named its general manager.
Jason Calacanis
Mitch Kapor
Mitchell David Kapor is the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the “killer application” often credited with making the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980s. He is known as an entrepreneur, investor, social activist, and philanthropist. Kapor has been the Chair of the Mozilla Foundation since its inception in 2003.
Vinod Khosla was a co-founder of Daisy Systems and founding Chief Executive Officer of Sun Microsystems , where he pioneered open systems and commercial RISC processors. Sun was funded by longtime friend and board member John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers . In 1986 Vinod joined Kleiner Perkins, where he was and continues to be a general partner of KPCB funds through KP X. Through the years there, with other partners, he took on Intel ’s monopoly with Nexgen/ AMD (the only microprocessor to have significant success against Intel, sold to AMD for 28 percent of AMD), incubated the idea and business plan for Juniper to take on Cisco ’s dominance of the router market, formulated the very early advertising-based search strategy for Excite, and transformed the moribund telecommunications business and its archaic SONET implementations with Cerent (sold to Cisco for $7.4B).
Vinod Khosla
An accomplished venture investor, private equity principal, company advisor, and entrepreneur, Chris manages a portfolio of over fifty consumer web, mobile, and wireless technology start- ups as well as an array of mature enterprises through his holding company, Lowercase Capital. While primarily known for its investments in seed and early stage technology companies, Lowercase has quietly become one of the largest momentum investment funds in the country. Previously, Chris served as Head of Special Initiatives at Google Inc.
Chris Sacca
Marc Lowell Andreessen [ 2 ] ( pron.: / æ n ˈ d r iː s ɨ n / an- DREE -sən ; born July 9, 1971) is an American entrepreneur, investor, software engineer, and multi-millionaire. He is best known as co-author of Mosaic , the first widely used Web browser ; as co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation ; [ 3 ] and as co-founder and general partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz . He founded and later sold the software company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard . Andreessen is also a co-founder of Ning , a company that provides a platform for social networking websites. An innovator and creator, he is one of the few people who has pioneered a software category (Web browsers) used by more than a billion people and established several billion-dollar companies. [ 4 ] He sits on the board of directors of Facebook, [ 5 ] eBay, [ 6 ] and HP, [ 7 ] among others.
Marc Andreessen
Peter Thiel
Peter Andreas Thiel ( German: [ˈpeːtɐ̯ anˈdʀeas tiːl] ; born October 11, 1967) [ 1 ] is a German -born American entrepreneur, venture capitalist , and hedge fund manager. Thiel co-founded PayPal with Max Levchin and served as its CEO . He currently serves as president of Clarium Capital , a global macro hedge fund with under $700 million in assets under management ; a managing partner in The Founders Fund , a $275 million venture capital fund that he launched with Ken Howery and Luke Nosek in 2005; and co-founder and investment committee chair of Mithril Capital Management. [ 4 ] [ 5 ] He was the first outside investor in Facebook , the popular social-networking site, with a 10.2% stake acquired in 2004 for $500,000, and sits on the company's board of directors. Thiel was ranked #293 on the Forbes 400 in 2011, with a net worth of $1.5 billion as of March 2012. [ 2 ] Thiel lives in San Francisco , California . [ 6 ] [ edit ] Early lifeEsther Dyson (born 14 July 1951) is a former journalist and Wall Street technology analyst who is a leading angel investor , entrepreneur, philanthropist, and commentator focused on breakthrough innovation in healthcare, government transparency, digital technology , biotechnology, and space. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] [ 6 ] [ 7 ] Dyson is currently focusing her career on preemptive healthcare and continues to invest in health technology. [ 8 ] On 7 October 2008, Space Adventures announced that Dyson had paid to train as a back-up spaceflight participant for Charles Simonyi 's trip to the International Space Station aboard the Soyuz TMA-14 mission which took place in 2009. [ 9 ] [ edit ] Life