Venture Hacks

Today we’re announcing that BlockChalk has raised money with AngelList.  BlockChalk is a “GPS-enabled communication system for your neighborhood.”

Update: Read BlockChalk’s story in their own words: Lessons from raising a seed round.

Update 2: Scott Austin at The Wall Street Journal reports on AngelList: Start-Ups Get Free Chance to Pitch to Angel Investors.

Joshua Schachter introduced us to BlockChalk. He was already committed to the financing and suggested they use AngelList to fill out the round. We sent BlockChalk to AngelList and the following investors asked for intros and invested:

Joshua Schachter (Our source)

Mitch Kapor (Investor in Twilio)

Thomas McInerney (Investor in Klout)

Josh Stylman (Investor in betaworks)

Josh Stylman (one of the AngelList investors above) then introduced BlockChalk to Chris Dixon and Eric Paley who also invested:

Chris Dixon

Eric Paley

So an AngelList intro to Josh Stylman turned into friend-of-a-friend intros to Chris Dixon and Eric Paley. It’s obvious in retrospect, but we didn’t anticipate these second-order intros when we started AngelList. It’s very cool to see this emergent behavior.

Satya Patel, Michael Dearing, and David Liu also invested in BlockChalk (though they didn’t source it with AngelList):

Satya Patel (Battery Ventures)

Michael Dearing (Investor in AdMob)

David Liu (Investor in SimpleGeo)

About BlockChalk

In their own words,

“BlockChalk is an early stage location-based service that helps people connect with their neighbors and mobilize their local communities. Using GPS-enabled smartphones, BlockChalk users can interact with people in their neighborhood to ask, answer, praise, gripe, report, prevent, borrow, trade, and much more. It’s easy and free; you don’t even have to sign up. BlockChalk is currently on iPhone and Palm, as well as on Android via HTML5.”

I think the foundation of BlockChalk’s fund-raising story is the pedigree of their team: Stephen Hood is the former head of product at del.icio.us, Dave Baggeroer is part of Stanford’s d.school faculty, and Josh Whiting is a former senior engineer at craigslist and former head of engineering for del.icio.us.

Mark Suster says that “Everything that happens is a signal.” And it’s a great signal when Joshua Schachter, who worked with two of the co-founders at del.icio.us, is investing.

Startups: Get intros to AngelList here.
Angels: Join AngelList here.
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