Le AngelList Blog
A blog about AngelList. For startup advice, see Venture Hacks.
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Experimenting with a new home page
Most home pages try to sell you with marketing spin. We’re not fans of those kinds of home pages. We’d rather just show you the range of people and startups you can connect with by joining our community. And that’s what our new, experimental home page aims to do.
If you’re looking for investors, you can search by location, market (e.g. “mobile”), or by “who you know and trust”. Let’s say you’re a Seattle startup, with a location-based mobile app and you’ve seen Mixer Labs co-founder and GeoAPI creator, Elad Gil speak at a conference and think he’s a clever guy. The new home page lets you quickly filter through the AngelList community to find investors who may be a match for you. From there, you can drill down and learn more about each investor.
If you’re looking for startups, you can also search my location, market, and people. Let’s say you’re a New York-based investor, looking for opportunities in the advertising space, and you too have a fondness for Elad. The “Find Startups” section of the home page allows you to quickly filter through the universe of AngelList startups to the ones that match your interests.
So if you’ve been thinking about joining AngelList, we hope this new tool gives you enough of a view into our community to nudge you over the fence. Let us know what you think.
(PS: you have to be “logged out” to see this new home page)
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Pitch or Follow The Midas List on AngelList
Forbes posted its 2011 Midas List last week, which ranks the top 100 tech VCs. The ranking methodology is subjective, but the list certainly includes many of the most talented technology investors.
The Midas List is well represented on AngelList—23 Midas Listers have AngelList profiles, with a median rank of 50 and mean rank of 49.
We’re thrilled to have such great investors participate in our community:
3 Reid Hoffman Greylock Partners6 Kevin Efrusy Accel Partners10 Marc Andreessen Andreessen Horowitz12 Fred Wilson Union Square Ventures17 Mike Maples FLOODGATE18 Josh Kopelman First Round Capital20 Jeremy Levine Bessemer Venture Partners22 David Skok Matrix Partners31 David Cowan Bessemer Venture Partners32 Jim White Sutter Hill Ventures48 George Zachary Charles River Ventures50 Greg Gretsch Sigma Partners53 Rich Levandov Avalon Ventures59 Danny Rimer Index Ventures60 Jeremy Liew Lightspeed Venture Partners65 Bruce Sachs Charles River Ventures73 David Weiden Khosla Ventures82 Chris Sacca Lowercase Capital87 Tim Chang Norwest Venture Partners88 Rich Wong Accel Partners98 Brian Ascher Venrock99 Bijan Sabet Spark Capital100 Brad Feld Foundry GroupMedian rank: 50
Mean rank: 49Pitch
If you’re an entreprenur and you’d like to pitch these investors, create your startup profile and use the investor picker to select these investors:
Keep in mind that it’s usually best to select as many investors as possible. Our investor picker can be slow sometimes, but we’re building new tools to make this experience awesome too.
Follow
If you’re an investor, simply login or join our community to follow them:
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Discovering People To Follow
Last week, we launched a new personalized startup feed based on the people, locations and markets you follow. The problem is, if you don’t follow anyone or anything, you get a not-so-relevant set of startups in your feed.
Today we’re launching a new feature to help you build your follower graph and improve the personalized-ness of startups in your personalized feed — Recommended People. Milos has cranked out a relevance algorithm to surface people that may be interesting to you. You can quickly and easily follow (or not) these people, and over time, your startup feed will begin to reflect your rich follower graph.
In the coming days/weeks, we’ll be launching more features to help you build your follower graph and improve your startup feed. Keep your eyes peeled.
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One Email, 13 Awesome Startups
We know you’re busy. We respect your time and want to make sure that every communication we have with you is high-signal and to the point. To that end, we’re testing out a new digest email format, where you can get bite-sized nuggets of startups we think you might be interested in. See something you like? Follow them, or take an intro. Let us do the work of connecting the right entrepreneurs with the right investors.
In case you haven’t heard, our friends over at AngelPad (no relation) just graduated their second class of 13 startups. We thought they were pretty amazing, so we emailed them out in our new digest format. Those of you who got the email, we hope you liked it (let us know what you think). Those of you who want to play with the cool kids, apply to be an AngelList investor.
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A New Way to Find Startups
AngelList has always been about connecting the right entrepreneurs with the right investors. Until now, most of these connections have been curated manually by the AngelList admins.
Thanks to lots of hard work (and late nights) from Milos, we’ve launched a new, personalized, automated startup feed for investors. The feed uses an algorithm that takes into account the people, locations and markets you follow. No two investors will have the same feed.
We hope this new feature will eventually take over our matchmaking duties. Ideally, startups should be visible to the most relevant investors as soon as they’re submitted.
We’re just getting started with the personalized feed. More changes to come based on your feedback. Let us know what you think.
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Joining AngelList as an Investor
If you’ve recently joined AngelList, you might have noticed a wizard that walks you through the process.
We’ve also launched a new way to get your investor profile approved automatically. If you fit our normal investment criteria — accreditation, key investments, and a reasonably complete profile — and you get 3 approved investors on the site to vouch for you, you’ll be approved automatically. These references can be through either email or Twitter. If 3 approved investors follow you on Twitter — and you meet the aforementioned criteria — you’ll be approved instantly.
Pro Tip: If you’re still waiting for approval, you can go to http://angel.co/references and request for references; we recommend at least 7 just to be sure you get responses. While you’re at it, be sure to spruce up your profile too!
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Faster Startup Processing with HTML Emails
Investors on AngelList tell us that they love our emails about new startups.
Andy and I just launched a new email design that should help speed up their startup email processing. The new design breaks out the startup’s product, traction, and team information, making it much easier for investors to quickly scan and make decisions about whether to take an intro.
Here’s what the email looks like. Let us know what you think. We hope you like it.
PS. Thanks to Dave Lifson of Postling for letting us use his startup’s profile (with some sections redacted)!
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A New Profile Page for Investors
Yesterday, Josh launched a set of features to help entrepreneurs connect with investors. Today, we’re giving investors a little love by launching a streamlined profile page.
The old profile page had lots of information that many of you didn’t find useful. With the new design, we’ve boiled the profile down to the essentials, giving users a clear, concise view of how investors can help, and their areas of interest.
We’ve also heard that many investors would like to use the profile page as their online resume or virtual business card — “Look me up on AngelList” — but the old profile page didn’t do a great job of showcasing their track record. With the new design, we’re taking our first steps toward making your angel.co address your online resume. Accredited investors who have an association with an AngelList startup — either investor, advisor, or team member — will now automatically see up to four sample startup associations on their profile page. We’re auto-generating your “tombstones”. At this time, this new feature has a few limitations. Only accredited investors can see other accredited investors’ startup associations (i.e. the general public or entrepreneurs can’t see them). Also, investors don’t have control over which four startups will appear.
In the coming weeks, we’ll be rolling out more features to give you control over this new tombstones section. We hope you like it.
Update! We’ve launched a public version of tombstones. If you’ve publicly declared your investment in a startup on AngelList, we’ll publicly display it.
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Engaging with Investors: Part 1
Entrepreneurs are always asking us, “What can I do now?” You’ve signed up, filled out your profile and bugged your investors and advisors to endorse it. Now what?Today we’re announcing the first in a series of features that will allow you, the entrepreneur, to engage with interested investors, instead of waiting for them to engage with you.If an investor follows your startup, you may send them a short introduction. You’ll find the tools to do so on the investor’s profile page. The investor will receive an email containing your intro and has the option to reply through AngelList.Stay tuned — we’ll soon be rolling features that will allow you to engage with second-degree connections. -
How to create an AngelList profile
Investors look for traction, product, and team. Social proof also helps when you’re trying to get a first meeting. So you need to kick ass in at least one of these areas.
Before you pitch investors, build a minimum viable product, put it in front of customers, and learn something about product/market fit. If you can’t get this far on your own, find some idea investors instead.
Then write a 150-word elevator pitch and create a startup profile on AngelList.Our elevator pitch template is a good place to start. Spend time writing and re-writing the pitch until it’s awesome. Get feedback from good writers and entrepreneurs who have raised money.
You have 100% control over the quality of your profile and there’s no reason not to kick its ass.
