

Ask HN: Whatever happened to AngelGate? - Zakuzaa

Ever since TC got acquired by AOL, they haven't posted anything on AngelGate.<p>Part of the deal? :P
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Eliezer
They waited a week, which was long enough to outlast Silicon Valley's
attention span, and then nobody talked about it ever again. Except for one
"whatever happened to...?" post on HackerNews, which spent a few hours on the
front page and then was also never talked about ever again. And then the next
time something like that happened, there wasn't much outrage, because it
wasn't _new_ any more, wasn't unusual, and people remembered that their
outrage hadn't accomplished much last time.

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alttab
Also known as: Facebook privacy concerns.

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swombat
I guess the parties involved all suddenly had an epiphany. They woke up one
morning and realised that by making such a big fuss about nothing, the only
thing they were liable to achieve was to fuck themselves over by bringing in
federal oversight into their industry.

So they shut up.

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charlief
You can speculate and create theories on the matter and bound some probability
of them being true, but there is a fundamental property of news. There are
lots of things we don't remember or care about, but we did before. These
events? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009> What happened to the Haiti earthquake
news? Haiti still needed help even before the recent Cholera outbreak. The
Wikileaks news will die again like it did before. Heck, even Spitzer has a
primetime show on CNN after his scandal.

Silicon Valley news isn't the only news with a short half-life.

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huhtenberg
I always assumed it was a pre-acquisition PR splash for TC, and not a genuine
concern on Arrington's part. Especially considering what alienation of wealthy
tech investors could do to his professional future.

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vaksel
Arrington was too busy spending his millions

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rradu
Either the publicity got all the participating angels to back off any deals
they made, or it wasn't really a thing in the first place.

Regardless, I don't see what AOL would have to do with it

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lenley
Part of the problem with the characterization of "Angel Gate" is that it is so
hard to say what collusion among angel investors would look like, and even if
it occured, if collusion as independent organizations would be sustainable.

There are lots of pools of angel investors around the country, I didn't see
"angel gate" as anything different then a precursor to forming some sort of
investment pool.

Those independent or newly pooled investors would still have to compete with
VCs, other pools of capital, private investors and a number of other smaller
investors.

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uptown
If nothing else, looks like Bin38 got a new website out of the deal.

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asanwal
Beyond attention spans and the like, the underlying premise of AngelGate was
flawed. There are not 10 angel investors in the Valley that make 100% of deals
which is what was asserted in the original post.

The supply of capital is incredibly fragmented.

All in all, great for pageviews on TC but not much else.

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fraserharris
Michael Arrington's coverage of AngelGate came off to me as 'you're on notice'
- a warning against colluding, etc more than anything else.

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j_baker
Just out of curiosity, what's left to discuss? The event already happened. I
seriously doubt that even with AOL in charge TC would let it go if there were
more news on that front. I think the simplest explanation is just that there
simply isn't any news left to report.

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kyro
Haters stopped hatin', playas keep playin', as Dave McClure would say.

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fleitz
Paid to make the problem go away, new news cycle. AOL is primarily a consumer
brand, ironically, with out consumers. This means that in order for AOL to
purchase them they need to have moved from the producer market to the consumer
market. Thus a story about startups financing is no longer relevant to most of
their audience.

