Le AngelList Blog
A blog about AngelList. For startup advice, see Venture Hacks.
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CityPockets fills out their $735k round on AngelList
Congrats to Cheryl, Jhony and the team at CityPockets on completing their seed round of $735k.
There are a bunch of companies that aggregate daily deals, but CityPockets aggregates deals post-purchase. With CityPockets, you don’t have to sign in to a million different deals sites to keep track of which vouchers you’ve bought and which are about to expire. The best part of the CityPockets experience is their marketplace where you can buy vouchers you might have missed, or sell vouchers you regretfully bought on impulse. Check it out.
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Shopobot announces their seed round, then launches
We get excited for companies when they complete a round of funding, but we get doubly excited when they launch their product. In the case of Shopobot, they did both.
Shopobot is like Kayak’s price tracker for gadget lovers. If you’re into cameras, home theater equipment, macs, and sports gear, you’d be insane to not use it.
Founders Dave and Julius were referred to AngelList by the impressive team at AngelPad (currently the top AngelList referrer in California) and were immediately able to meet a diverse set of high quality investors and fill out their round.
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Getting credit for high-quality referrals
Many of the best startups on AngelList have been brought into the community by our users. But we haven’t done nearly enough to recognize these users for their hard work.
Announcing a new feature that we hope will go part of the way to saying “thanks”. Starting today, you can flag yourself as the “referrer” of a startup on AngelList. When you do so, a number of changes happen:
- You get prime placement as the referrer in the Followers section
- You appear in the Endorsers section with a “Referrer” badge
- Any shares you initiate will label you as the referrer
- If your referrals lead to a high number of introductions and follows, you appear as the “top referrer” on location and market pages
To flag yourself as a referrer, click on the “Add Me to This Profile” button at the base of the profile page for any startup you’ve referred to us, and select “the referrer”.
Consider this our first step in giving referrers credit for their work… more to come. Let us know what you think.
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EquaShip gets a $900k boost
Seattle-based EquaShip today announced a $900k funding round that included a $250k chunk from investors they found on AngelList:
- Tellme and Swipely founder, Angus Davis
- IGN & Cadence founder, Ken Keller
- DealTaker founder, Neal Rapoport
- New York angel, Amer Rehman
- Saratoga-based Paseman and Associates
- New York-based MI Ventures
Ron Wiener, EquaShip CEO, is pretty busy building his company, so he only had time to say this about his AngelList experience:
We’ll be back for our second round.
Thanks Ron. And congrats!
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OcuSpec connects with investors on AngelList to fill out their $1.3M round
We’re excited to see that OcuSpec - creators of a new super-powerful Kinect-like motion controller - closed their $1.3M seed round via some impressive investor introductions on AngelList.
Founders Michael Buckwald and David Holtz were able to connect with…
- Ronny Conway, partner at Andreessen Horowitz
- Brian McClendon, Keyhole co-founder and Google VP for Geo
- Max Woon, former Xfire CTO and LA-based angel
- Stephen Culp, founder of Smart Furniture, CEO at Delegator, and partner at CRF
- Singapore-based angel, Rico Wyder
Here’s what Michael had to say about his AngelList experience…
We were blown away by the quality of investors we got to talk with. Within a few weeks, we’d filled out our round with a brilliant group of investors, guys we probably wouldn’t have met otherwise. Thanks AngelList!
Congrats guys!
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Keeping tabs on the startups you follow
There’s a lot going on in the startup community and quite a bit of it happens on AngelList. While many of our users love to have minute-by-minute visibility to every comment, intro and investment at angel.co, lots of our users simply don’t have the time.
To help the time-challenged among us, we’ve created a new startup activity email. For each startup you’ve followed, you’ll get a weekly update on all of their status updates, comments, and - if you’re an investor - intros and investments. It’s a great way to keep tabs on the startups you follow. This new startup email is still in “beta”, so you should expect more enhancements in the coming weeks. Let us know what you think.
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Hiding your startup from competitors just got easier
A few weeks ago, we blogged about the new investor selector. It’s a great tool for choosing investors to view your startup. The feedback so far has been great, but quite a few entrepreneurs mentioned that the tool fails to help them find investors in competitors (so that they can exclude these investors from having visibility to their startup’s restricted info).
To remedy this, we just launched a simple but powerful addition to the investor selector: filter by companies.
When you add a company to this filter, we’ll return a list of people who invested in the company, along with team members, and more. This should not only allow you to “de-select” people who invested in competitor companies, but it’s a great tool for finding new people to follow.
We hope you like it.
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Spreading the love (and like) around AngelList
If you’re an investor on AngelList, you’re familiar with our “share” emails. When we find a gem of a startup, we share it with investors who might be interested. And it’s not just us doing the sharing … any investor can share a startup.
The one downside with shares is that they can take a bit of work … you have to choose your list of recipients and - if you want someone to pay attention - write a comment. Sometimes you just want a lightweight way of saying “I like it” without the analysis.
Enter the “Like”.
When you like something in your Activity feed, that item gets distributed to your followers’ feeds. It’s a dead-easy way of sending something around the AngelList community. Try it out.
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Finding people on AngelList
Last week, we showed you how entrepreneurs can use the new investor picker filtering features to limit visibility to their startup profile.
We forgot to mention that anyone with an AngelList account - investors, entrepreneurs, all users - can take advantage of these features to find new people to follow. It’s all in the redesigned “People” section. There, you’ll find the same filtering goodness that we blogged about last week: filters for role, people, markets and locations. Check it out.
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Announcing a new way for entrepreneurs to pick investors
Every situation is unique. Some entrepreneurs want their startup to be visible to as many investors as possible. Others want to focus on a few specific investors with specific interests. We aim to cover both of these situations, and every one in-between, so we’ve just released the first redesign of our new and improved investor selector.
Perhaps the best way to explain the value of this new investor selector is through a real life use case. Here at AngelList, Nivi has become famous for his inside-out t-shirts, so famous, in fact, that we get swamped with email requests from members of the AngelList and Venture Hacks communities asking to buy Nivi-T’s. The AngelList team has decided to ride this tsunami of demand and pivot our business toward the fashion world. To do this, we need to make connections with people who can help us succeed in this exciting new direction.
To get started, I go to our AngelList startup profile. Down in the restricted information section, I can see the number of users who have visibility. I click edit …
From here, I can either target all users, or a set of users I select. I click “Edit” near the “Visible only to investors I select” option…
Now I’m presented with the new investor selector. The interface has a set of filters on the left, and a sortable table of people matching those filters on the right. I can see at the top the total number of people who have been selected.
One thing that comes to mind in contemplating our new inside-out t-shirt business is that I want as few people to know about this as possible. So the first thing I do on the investor selector is “Select None”. To double check that this really worked, I can see at the top of the screen that the total number of people selected has been set to zero. Nice.
Now I get to work on the filters. We’re at a pretty early stage in this new fashion venture, so I filter roles by “Angel” and “Seed Funds”. Next, we trust Jeff and Manu, so I’ll add them to our list of people filters. I filter markets to “Fashion” and, since we’re based in SF and it might be easier to explain our plans face-to-face, I set location to “San Francisco”. These filters result in a nice clean set of users that match our interests, our situation, and our trust network. I can Command-click (or Control-click) on each of the investors to learn more about them in separate browser tabs. Just about done…
From here, I “Select All” and check that all 11 people have been selected. I click “Done Selecting Investors” …
… and that’s it. My visibility settings now say that my startup’s restricted information is visible to 11 users. Now I’d better go and change the rest of our startup profile to get our pitch just right. Wish us luck.
We hope you like the new investor selector. Expect to see additional refinements as we learn more about how you’re using it, what’s working, what’s not, etc. Let us know what you think.
