Nivi · February 5th, 2010
We’re blown away by the support for StartupList and AngelList.
Thank you to TechCrunch, Business Insider, and ReadWriteWeb for describing these lists better than we could.
Thank you to the well-known investors, successful entrepreneurs, and up-and-coming entrepreneurs discussing these lists on Twitter.
Widget: Twitter discussion about AngelList and StartupList
New angels on AngelList
75 new angels have applied to AngelList. We’re going through the applications one-by-one. I added some great investors today:
Chris DeVore from Founders Co-op
Robin Klein in London
Thomas Korte, an investor in Heroku
David Shen, an investor in bit.ly
David Rose, a New Yorker with 75 angel investments
Shervin Pishevar, founder of SGN
Pejman Nozad, an investor in Dropbox
And I didn’t even know these three entrepreneurs were angels until they applied to AngelList:
Jeremy Stoppelman, founder of Yelp
Joe Greenstein, founder of Flixster
Aaron Patzer, founder of Mint
Silicon Valley has a tradition where entrepreneurs start investing as soon as they can — and that tradition is spreading to the rest of the world.
Startups are getting intros
Since we released StartupList on Twitter a few weeks ago, we’ve introduced 7 startups to 11 investors. With their permission, here’s a list of investors who’ve gotten intros:
Jeff Clavier (Angel in Mint)
Bill Lee (Angel in Posterous)
Mike Hirshland (Polaris)
Chris Yeh (Angel in AppJet)
Naval Ravikant (Angel in Twitter)
Jeff Fagnan (Atlas)
Brian Norgard (Angel in ad.ly)
George Zachary (Charles River)
Alex Finkelstein (Spark Capital)
David Cohen (Techstars)
Matt Mullenweg (Angel in DailyBurn)
How to get on StartupList
We’ve received 50 new pitches from startups. If you’ve got a good pitch, don’t worry about getting lost in the noise. A good pitch will stand out — and we will find a way to help that startup through StartupList or something else. If you’ve got a great startup on your hands, people will insist on helping you out.
Yesterday, we published guidelines for applying to StartupList. We said we look for the same things that early stage investors look for: traction, social proof, and team. But we didn’t mention another critical piece of the puzzle: the quality of the pitch itself.
Spend time writing and re-writing an awesome elevator pitch. Our elevator pitch template is a good place to start. Then get feedback from good writers — writers who have fans. You have 100% control over the quality of your pitch and there’s no reason not to kick its ass.
Apply to StartupList. Browse AngelList. And enjoy the weekend.
Topics AngelList · StartupList
Nivi, thanks for putting this together. Is there a way to edit our pitch? We’ve recently had some great boosts to our business, and would like to add them to the information that angels receive.
There’s no way to edit your pitch yet but you can always email me updates.
Hey guys, awesome idea! If I wanted to raise money I’d definitely use this! But I want to do my startup on my own budget and bootstrap (mostly because of wanting to keep control of the direction of startup). So the thing I’d prefer to raising money is to get a mentor/advisor. That would be gold. Maybe it would be possible to use the list and get an introduction to some guys to be advisors (I’d love to learn from Yelp’s founder and WordPress’ founder, for example).
The investors on AngelList are there as prospective investors, not prospective advisors. Most of them will want to invest if they’re advising — that’s how they get paid.