Venture Hacks

They said it couldn’t be done, but we’ve released a feature that lets you control which angels see your startup on AngelList. When you add your startup to AngelList, you’ll see a button to pick your angels:

Click it, and this beast will pop up:

Then pick the angels who should see your startup. The angels you don’t pick won’t get access to your startup at all.

You can search for angels by name:

And you can filter the list by fund type (angel, VC, seed fund…), activity (is the angel actually taking meetings and doing investments on AngelList), and location.

So what the hell is this good for?

Avoid angels who’ve invested in competitors, keep your pitch hidden while you’re still editing it, avoid VCs, embrace VCs, pitch VCs on your Series A, test out your pitch on half the list first, pitch local investors, et cetera, et cetera.

In general, unless you really know what you’re doing, you should select everyone on AngelList. If the AngelList admins decide to mail your startup to the investors you’ve selected, you’ll get more intros if you pick all the angels. And if the admins don’t think your startup is ready for an email, the angels who review all the startups that join AngelList might decide to take an intro on their own. Again, you’re more likely to get “crowd sourced” by the angels if you select more angels.

Please let us know how you use this new tool. We’ve tested it on Chrome, Safari and Firefox too. IE is another story. Anyway, if you haven’t tried Chrome, you should give it a go — my mom likes it.

There isn’t much to do on AngelList if you’re not an approved angel. Startups can apply, track some basic stats about their application and that’s about it. The angels get all the cool features for now — for example, they get a pretty nice interface for reviewing pitches that I’ll show you sometime.

But until then, check out this real time feed of investor activity on the AngelList home page:

When an investor takes an intro to a startup, invests in a startup, shares a startup, or likes a startup, you’ll see it on the home page. We obviously don’t display the startup’s name. And, of course, angels can go anonymous.

This is the real time pulse of AngelList. We stare at it all day. It’s also a pretty nifty way for angels to get on the home page (we get requests for this all the time). So please let us know how you like it.

Daniel Odio from AppMakr is chronicling their fundraising in a series of blog posts starting here.

AppMakr used AngelList to close Mitch Kapor, a VPE at Google, Jeremie Berrebi, Pietro Dova, and other folks in the paperwork stage.

And Daniel’s first post includes a long interview with Naval:

See Daniel’s post for more details and an invite to the AppMakr party on October 28th. Thanks for putting this together Daniel.

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.

I’m working on a Quora thread called:

Which startups have been funded via AngelList?

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.

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.

Update: The most up-to-date list of Scouts is here.

AngelList Scouts find high-quality startups for the angels on AngelList. When a Scout tells us to look at a startup, we pay attention.

Update: Liz Gannes covers this story for GigaOM.

We look at every startup that applies to AngelList — whether or not they have social proof — but a little social proof makes it easier for us to say yes. And the social proof of a Scout is especially interesting to us.

Why? Because the average Joe usually doesn’t get anything when he makes intros for a startup. He might get some advisory shares but that’s rarer thank you think.

The Scouts program is different. First, the Scouts are getting AngelList profiles with badges that display how many high-quality startups they’ve referred to the community. With the startups’ permission, we’ll list the names of the startups too. And most important: the Scouts will be able to send startups directly to AngelList, under their own names, without us in the middle.

Who are the Scouts? Each of these Scouts has sent us one high-quality startup that was good enough for AngelList. And most have sent more.

Los Angeles:

J. Grubb (@jonathangrubb), Founder of Get Satisfaction

Seattle:

Tony Wright (@webwright), Founder of RescueTime

Chicago:

Harper Reed (@harper), Former CTO of Threadless

New York:

David Lifson (@dlifson), CEO of Postling

Silicon Valley:

Rafael Corrales (@rafaelcorrales), LearnBoost

Jamie Quint (@jamiequint), Founder of Snaptalent

Gagan Biyani (@gaganbiyani), Founder of Udemy

Sam Odio (@sodio), CEO of Divvyshot

Jason Putorti (@putorti), Founder of Votizen

Sundeep Ahuja (@sunrock)

Boston:

David Hauser (@dh), Founder of Grasshopper, Chargify

London:

Brendan Baker (@brendanbaker), Oxford MBA

And here’s a Twitter list of the Scouts: @angellist/scouts.

How do you get to be a Scout? Refer one high-quality startup that’s good enough to share with AngelList (tell startups to list you in the referrer field). Then get in touch with us, tell us you want to be a Scout, and we’ll start a conversation. I’m sure we’ll modify these guidelines over time, but it’s a good start.

Questions? Contact our Scout @brendanbaker and cc me @nivi.

If you’re a startup that’s trying to contact the angels on AngelList, consider getting in touch with one of our Scouts. They can help.

This Xconomy article by Wade Roush does a great job of telling the AngelList and Venture Hacks story:

In Seed Funding Race, AngelList Sorts the “Junk” from the “Maybes”

I hesitated to link to it because these articles always make you look more handsome than you really are. But Wade does a great job of rounding up the state of the art of angel investing and placing AngelList in that context. Here’s a choice quote:

“I think the way to get into angel investing is, first, you obviously have to have money; you have to have a brand, otherwise you are not going to be differentiated and you are not going to see good deals; and you have to have a network of angels to work with, so you can move in packs and find other people to help you with due diligence,” Ravikant says.

It’s only then that AngelList can help. “The final thing is that you need to have good deal flow, so that you can see when the good things come along,” Ravikant says. “We will bring you deal flow, make it easy to syndicate deals, and we’ll show you deals that hopefully over time matches up to your interests.”

Check out the rest of the thoughtful article.

Quora is a Q&A site. We were planning on posting a question asking startups and angels to share their AngelList experience. But someone beat us to it:

What do people think of AngelList?

I can’t think of a better piece of marketing than this thread. There’s nothing we could say better. I want to replace the AngelList homepage with this thread.

Quora spam

Quora’s goal is “to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question.”

The Quora community will kill you if you fill it with rubbish. You have to have a lot of very happy users to try Quora marketing. And you have to expect negative reviews too. Quora’s looking for the best answer — not your answer.

Hating Quora

I’ve resisted Quora since they were in closed beta. Partly because everyone was raving about it. Partly because I thought the user experience was insane.

Now I’m hooked. And I think they’ve created a new class of user experience.  It’s a “go with the flow” experience. Don’t try to load a model of the site in your head — it’s too complicated and they’re constantly redesigning it. Just expect things to be there when you need them. And expect that you can do a lot with each piece of data on the site (suggest revisions, revise it, revert it, vote on it, eat it, thank the author…).

Quora’s a lot like The Wire, you’ll hate the first 5 episodes — then something will happen in your head and you won’t be able to shut up about it. Follow me and Naval on Quora and check out the AngelList thread already.