Venture Hacks

AngelList now has markets at http://angel.co/markets and we’re using them to match startups and investors. The markets look like this:

Startups add markets to their profile, investors follow markets, and we match them. Magic!

1. Adding markets to startup profiles

Startups can add 4 markets to their profile:

And here’s what a startup sees while they’re editing their markets:

2. Adding markets to investor profiles

Investors can add markets to their profile with a similar interface:

(For example, check out the markets Mitch Kapor is following and blocking.)

You won’t see this part unless you’re an approved investor, but investors can also follow and block markets from various places on the site like http://angel.co/markets:

…or any market page like the cloud computing page:

3. Matching startups and investors

If an investors blocks a market, the admins won’t email them startups in that market at all (but investors can still find these startups on the website).

If an investor follows a market, the admins will email them startups in that market before everybody else. If the startup performs well among those investors, the admins will email it to everybody else (who isn’t blocking the startup’s markets).

Organizing the markets with a tree

Investors don’t need to worry about following and blocking every single market on AngelList. The markets are set up as a tree—like your desktop file system—with markets inside other markets. So when investors follow a market, they also follow its submarkets. Likewise with blocking.

If you prefer to view the markets as a flat list, go to http://angel.co/markets/list:

Sorting

Whether you’re viewing the markets as a tree or list, you can sort them by name, recently added, # of followers, and # of blockers. Approved investors can also sort the markets by # of startups. Here’s a picture of the the flat list, sorted by followers:

Searching for markets

The search box at the top left of the site lets you search for investors and markets (and startups too, if you’re an approved investor):

Again, investors who follow mobile will also follow all of its submarkets like mobile commerce, mobile advertising, etc. Or if they’re only interested in mobile coupons, they can just follow that instead.

Stealing from Quora

We stole a lot of the design for markets from Quora’s topics. There are some differences and technical details that we’ll write about soon. But we refer to Quora and Facebook a lot while we’re designing. The rest of the web is going to look like Quora in a few years anyway, so you may as well steal from the best.

Serving new markets

We’re very excited about this feature. It’s going to increase the relevancy of the startups that we send investors. And it will let us serve startups and investors in markets that we haven’t been able to serve before (biotechnology, clean technology, life sciences, you name it).

The markets tour continues in Part 2.