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“Excellent stuff!” — Evan Williams, Founder of Twitter and Blogger “A fantastic blog…” — James Hong, Founder of Hot or Not more reviews→ |
Free the Firehose
by Nivi on October 13th, 2010
That’s a tweet from Albert Wenger at Union Square Ventures. Thanks kindly Albert.
The Firehose is a new feature on AngelList that gives investors unfiltered access to all the startups that want to meet them. Startups tell us who they want meet — if they say they want to meet Albert, they show up in Albert’s Firehose. If not, they don’t.
We still go through the Firehose every day and email the best startups to the investors they want to meet. But every investor has different filters. And they want to find startups before anyone else gets their hands on them. That’s what the Firehose is for. Investors login every morning to see what’s new on AngelList (we get 10-20 new startup applications a day).
We released the Firehose last week and 37 startups have already gotten intros to 12 investors like Thomas Korte (Heroku), Bob Pasker (Mint), Ori Sasson (VMWare), Beau Lasky (Playdom), Auren Hoffman (Meebo), and Peter Chane (iLike).
That’s 37 startups that probably wouldn’t have gotten meetings with investors if they had to rely solely on the Nivi and Naval filter. There’s no reason we should be the only filters on AngelList and we’re working on ways to get the right startups into the hands of the right investors on AngelList.
We’re really excited about this feature — big ups to the law offices of Leonardo, Slayton, and Capone who built this bad boy.
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Which startups have been funded via AngelList?
by Nivi on October 12th, 2010
I’m working on a Quora thread called:
So far, the thread lists 27 startups that have raised money with AngelList. I think the real number is closer to 40 and I’m still prodding AngelList startups to write responses. Check it out.
Quora makes it fun and easy to create quality content. But that’s not the only reason I used it. Quora lets people answer in their own words, without going through my filter. So readers get to see the raw data. And it opens us up to revision and criticism. We don’t control the environment so the data seems more authentic.
I’m guessing the Quora team shudders at the thought of Quora marketing (I would too) but good marketing is just good communication and education. Everyone who works on a Quora thread is driven by an incentive and talking about your product isn’t a bad one.
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The Venture Hacks Newsletter is back
by Nivi on October 11th, 2010
The Venture Hacks Newsletter is back baby. It’s a daily digest of our tweets — subscribe via email or RSS. The email version looks pretty sweet:
(The newsletter was broken for a few months and we’ve finally gotten around to fixing it.)
We read all the startup advice on the Web and link to the best stuff on Twitter. If you don’t want to miss a tweet, sign up for the daily digest. Fred Wilson and 2000 other folks have given us permission to invade their inboxes, so it can’t be too bad.
Subscribe via email or RSS — if you hate it, you can unsubscribe with a single click.
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What you can learn from The Social Network
by Nivi on October 9th, 2010
I’ve been blogging a bit on Quora — here are a couple recent posts.
What you can learn from The Social Network:
The Social Network is an incredibly well made and motivating film.
I don’t care about the facts of the matter — they’re irrelevant. The movie tells a better story about startup life than anything you’ve ever read in the press.
Pretend this is a film about fictional people and a fictional product. Here are a few things you can learn:
Facebook was built on strengths, not weaknesses. Mark, Sean, and Eduardo each have their strengths. If you focus on their weaknesses, they seem like bad apples. It is their strengths that make them effective. You can only build performance on strength — you cannot build it on weakness.
If you’re not in the room while the deal is going down, prepare to get screwed. My favorite line in the movie is when Sean and Mark meet Peter Thiel for a few minutes and Peter concludes the negotiation with, “So, who is this Eduardo Saverin?”
Cleantech is boring because it doesn’t attract product designers.
Cleantech problems are engineering problems, not product problems.
Here’s the product design of the best cleantech product ever: lots of clean energy in a very small space, at low cost — the end.
So cleantech attracts engineers who like to solve puzzles instead of product designers who like to build things like iPads and Quoras.
Right or wrong?
See my Quora posts for more masterpieces.
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The rise of the angels
by Nivi on October 8th, 2010
This is Naval’s keynote from Capital Factory‘s demo day. It’s called The Rise of the Angels, but it should be called The Rise of the Entrepreneur. It’s excellent.
Here are the slides. Make sure you check out Slide 8 for a draft Entrepreneur’s Bill of Rights. And Slide 20 for Naval’s prediction that spectacular fraud will occur in angel investing.
Some of my favorite quotes from the presentation:
The venture industry has already changed.
Venture capital is a business and is open to attack by startups with disruptive new business models and technologies.
Less meeting; more tweeting.
Thanks to Joshua Baer for inviting us to give the keynote.
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Vinod Khosla: "I was much more of a glorified recruiter."
by Nivi on October 7th, 2010
Vinod Khosla at TechCrunch Disrupt:
“I think the single, most important fact about doing a startup is being clear about your vision and not letting it get distorted by what pundits and experts tell you.
“But the second most important thing is finding the right team. And that’s really, really hard, because people tend to look for people around them and so it’s the person who they happen to know as opposed to the best possible person to find.
“You know, I was relentless. It took a lot of time. I used to say when I was starting my first company, I was much more of a glorified recruiter than a CEO, or a founder. I really spent probably well over 50% of my time recruiting, and I encourage all entrepreneurs to try and do that.
“It’s also hard because you’ve never hired a marketing person. You don’t what a good marketing person is. You don’t even know what a good developer is. So whose judgment to trust, whose advice to take, is really really hard.”
Corollary: If you can’t recruit a good team, your vision probably needs distortion. Vinod’s quote starts at 19:20 in the video but I encourage you to watch the whole interview.
→ 1 CommentLearn more about:Quotes · Recruiting
Welcoming the Kauffman Foundation
by Nivi on October 5th, 2010
We’re very happy to announce that the Kauffman Foundation has made a significant contribution to support Venture Hacks. If you don’t know them, Kauffman is a $2B non-profit foundation devoted to entrepreneurship.
How it happened
Update: See Bo’s comment about why they decided to support Venture Hacks.
Earlier this year I got an cold email from Bo Fishback at the Kauffman Foundation:
Hey Nivi –
I’ve been following Venture Hacks for a while and have sent many many people there.
I’m interested in talking to you about sponsorship or support. Can we get on the phone for a super short call sometime in the next couple of weeks? Not this week.
Thanks,
Bo Fishback
After a phone call, I flew to Kansas city to meet Bo and the Kauffman team. I pitched them without a deck. Instead, I built a 1-page outline, Wufoo-style, and “did it live”. If I wanted to show them our analytics, I pulled up Google Analytics. If I wanted to show them our products, I went to our products page. If I wanted to show them testimonials, I went to our Twitter favorites.
When I got home, I got some advice from Steve Blank: when you’re making an enterprise sale, do your sponsor’s work for him. If your sponsor needs a pitch for other people in the organization, build it for him. So I called Solvate and they helped me build a deck which Bo used to make the sale to their grant committee. Here are a few random slides from the deck:
About Kauffman
Kauffman is a $2B non-profit foundation devoted to entrepreneurship — they fund Nobel prize winners. And now they want to reach you — the future founders of high-growth companies.
We’re very happy to bring them on board as a supporter and to welcome them to Silicon Valley.
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If only we could raise money
by Nivi on October 2nd, 2010
Stop saying:
“If only we could raise money, we could do X.”
Start saying:
“If we do X and we’re lucky, we might be able to raise money.”
(This was quite popular on Twitter — 91 retweets — so I’m reproducing it here. You should follow us on Twitter. There’s a lot of good and bad startup advice coming out these days and we tweet about the best.)
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Blogging on Quora
by Nivi on September 28th, 2010
I’ve been doing a bit of blogging on a Q&A site called Quora.
Quora makes it fun and easy to write. Sometimes I ask and answer my own questions. Sometimes I answer other people’s questions. Here’s a few of my answers.
It’s always a good time to apply. You can now continuously update your application and we’ll review it every time.
Here’s how I personally filter the startups:
- If you’ve got good social proof, I’m done — I’ll make intros.
- If not, then if you’ve got great traction, I’m done — I’ll make intros.
- If not, then if you’ve got an awesome demo, I’m done — I’ll make intros.
- If not, then if you’ve got a killer team, I’m done — I’ll make intros.
- If not, no intros. Go back to work on your startup, improve one of these metrics, and apply again.
But those are just my personal filters. And my filters don’t matter much anymore. Any of the angels on AngelList can now share deals with their followers.
Social proof is when you do something because other people are doing it. If you’re walking down the street and everyone is looking up at the sky, you look up at the sky.
In this context, social proof is looking at what other investors, entrepreneurs, and advisors are doing. Customers don’t count.
I’ll disagree with Naval Ravikant on “An investor is choosing not to invest in your company and is making the introduction for you”. I don’t think this is as bad as he makes it out to be.
The primitive part of your brain will probably recoil when a peer sends you their rejects. But the logical part of your brain will ask why the investor is passing. And there’s often a good reason: wrong market, wrong stage, wrong geography, bad chemistry with entrepreneur, some known risks that the investor doesn’t want to take, etc.
Rejecting a deal just because a peer rejected it is mathematically unsound. Here’s the proof. Every deal you ever invested in was probably rejected by a peer at around the same time you made the investment. So, if your criterion is that you will reject deals that peers reject, you will never make any investments
How do I get started in angel investing?
For dealflow, check out Y Combinator and the other incubators that are popping up all over the world. Also check out AngelList.
For how-to, see Paul Graham’s How to be an angel investor, our follow-up How to be an angel investor, Part 2, and the AngelConf videos.
To meet other angels, check out AngelConf (roughly once a year), and introduce yourself to the angels on the AngelList Twitter List.
Who were the first 25 angels on AngelList?
We started with Naval and emailed the angels we knew. It spread and there are about 400 angels on the site now.
1. Naval Ravikant
2. Manu Kumar
3. Dharmesh Shah
→ 4 CommentsLearn more about:AngelList · Quora
How Udemy got oversubscribed
by Nivi on September 10th, 2010
Gagan Biyani, founder of Udemy, tells the story of how he got 2x oversubscribed with a little help from Keith Rabois, Adeo Ressi, AngelList, and many others:
Udemy went out to raise money in February-March 2010. We received more than 30 no’s largely because investors weren’t confident enough in the business to pull the trigger.
Udemy focused hard on traction and launched the product in May 2010. By July, we had some promising numbers and decided to pitch again. We leveraged Adeo Ressi of the Founder Institute heavily before and during the fundraising.
I connected with a lot of friends and great CEO’s before fundraising to get intros. One of the most helpful was Darian Shirazi (CEO of Fwix), who intro’ed us to 3 of our investors. Afterwards, we made him advisor to thank him and because we wanted to keep an ongoing relationship with him.
Keith Rabois, one of the first people we re-met with, agreed to lead the round. In this meeting, we told Keith we wanted to raise $300K-$500K.
We leveraged AngelList to get additional momentum and investors for the round. It was critical to our success.
Within 2 weeks, we had more than $500K committed.
One more week later, we had more than $1M committed. We closed the round at $1M…
We can’t speak higher of AngelList and the value it provided to Udemy’s fundraising process. We received over 25 intro’s to top-tier investors. What other way can you get 25 investors to ask for intros to YOU! AngelList led to investments from Jeremy Stoppelman (CEO of Yelp), Dave McClure (500 Startups), Josh Stylman (Angel Investor, co-founder at Rotomedia and Reprise Media), and Ben Ling (executive roles at Google, Facebook, YouTube). But what was even more important was that AngelList got our round over-subscribed, so we had momentum which helped convince our other investors to make their decisions faster and in our favor.
This is what I like about great startup cities like Silicon Valley: a loosely organized team of investors and entrepreneurs giving their time and money to help get a company off the ground. Read the full post.
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