
Ask HN: Do you need angel funding? - epi0Bauqu
https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dGtnQ2NtVE5WcS1jdHVMWGN6OVNWV2c6MA
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jasonmcalacanis
If you do, I suggest checking out the Open Angel Forum. We just had the
boulder event on Wednesday night and it went really well.

We are going to expand to 10 cities this year, including SF, Palo Alto, NY,
Boston, Shanghai, Seattle and Atlanta.

\-- 100 folks apply for five slots. \-- 20 uber-angels in the room (at least
four investments in the past year) \-- no fees to startups or angels

best jason www.twitter.com/openangelforum

~~~
mrduncan
Jason, I know you don't post here all that often but please don't sign your
comments. The guidelines ask users not to, and more importantly it takes
emphasis away from your (very useful) comment and places it on your signature
instead.

From the guidelines - _Please don't sign comments, especially with your url.
They're already signed with your username. If other users want to learn more
about you, they can click on it to see your profile._

~~~
mhartl
I agree with this, and I'd add that it's fine to include links, just not as
part of a signature. Moreover, by prepending the http part you can make them
clickable, e.g., <http://twitter.com/openangelforum>.

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webwright
I think this survey/spreadsheet misses the almost all of the things that
motivate angels (check out <http://venturehacks.com/startuplist> ). Your
survey is entirely idea-focused. What it should ask (IMO) is:

"Who are you and what have you pulled off in the past?" (with links) "Who
vouches for you (investors, preferably)?" "What's the market/idea?" (very
short- most investors realize that the idea changing is VERY likely) "Describe
your traction?" "Could this be a $100m company?"

If you aren't shooting for a big market opportunity ($100m+) you just crossed
95% of angels off your list. If you have no traction/growth, you just crossed
95% of angels off your list-- UNLESS you've clearly kicked ass in the past
(note: kicked ass does NOT mean "did really good at your job")

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epi0Bauqu
I updated the form:

\--I had figured traction would be included in status, but I just explicitly
added help text to that effect.

\--Added team question with your help text.

\--Added 'How big is it?' as help text to idea question.

I didn't want to scare off any people, however, so left off who vouches for
you for now.

~~~
webwright
Yeah, I think the frustrating thing about angel fundraising is that it isn't
really fair. You're smart, you've got a good idea, but no one really wants to
invest in you unless you've already succeeded with a previous idea/company OR
your current idea is already succeeding.

In other words, they are looking for a small-but-growing fire in a huge/dry
forest they can throw gasoline on. Most people on that list are a little pile
of wood that needs a spark. And they are in a foggy stand of trees that MIGHT
be a forest, but might just be a few trees on a hillside. Vast majority of
investors aren't in the spark business, they are in the gasoline business.

<http://twitter.com/joshk/statuses/8034018934>

~~~
cookiecaper
In short, no one wants to give you money unless you don't really need it. It's
been true for a long time, and almost all lenders operate that way.

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ashishk
Would this be considered a public stock offering? I remember learning in class
that this sort of stuff (seeking funding publicly on the web) may result in
some legal trouble. I may be wrong though.

~~~
alain94040
What you can't do is _take_ money from non accredited investors (ie., the
public). But announcing in public that you'll be looking to raise money from
professional angels (who _are_ accredited) is ok.

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epi0Bauqu
The form submits here:
[https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AvP564P3eSROdGtnQ2N...](https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AvP564P3eSROdGtnQ2NtVE5WcS1jdHVMWGN6OVNWV2c&hl=en)

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aditya
Who'se asking? :-)

Just wondering if this is for info purposes only? or, are you actually going
to promote it somewhere?

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epi0Bauqu
No, it's for funding purposes. Lots of angel investors are on HN. If it's on
top for a while, people will see it.

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chime
I've always seen posts like this here on HN and was always too shy to share
this early-on in development. I keep hoping for the day when I can do "Review
my app: Blah" but the difficulty for me is actually getting to that stage
because of time/motivation reasons. So I'm hoping that by sharing my idea
early on, I can work more on it if others like the concept and feel it could
be worthwhile. Even if you think it isn't practical/fund-worthy, feel free to
let me know.

~~~
keefe
I've thought about doing that myself. I've been thinking about what it means
to bring in users 0-100,100-500,500-1000 and so forth... I guess I would like
to try bringing in non-technical people as users first.

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maxklein
So far, of the 6, the only one I would invest in is skribit. But I don't have
that kind of money. Let me add my idea in there, in case anyone has an extra
300k to throw at it.

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aditya
Skribit didn't say what kinda money they were looking at though... From what I
know, most angel rounds get funded by multiple angels each putting in between
25-50k, so if you wanted to get in on that, you should :-)

~~~
PStamatiou
Still not sure what kind of money we're looking for but talking to other
startup friends (and assuming the money is in SV and have to relocate) it's
about 175k-200k for 1 year of 2 full-time coders. I can personally live rather
cheaply (heck $15k seed lasted over a year and I'm still running with it) but
it depends on the going rate for rails coders and such. Not many coders I've
come across care about equity these days and are all "fuck you, pay me" haha.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1097188>

So increase that amount depending on what we want to do - 3 full-time devs and
a business/sales guy for 18 months, or 3 full-time devs, a biz guy and part-
time designer? Then I have to think about if I want to take the Venture Hacks
route of "raise as much as you can, when you can" or the Om/Fred Wilson route
of "milestone funding".. enough to get to X, then raise again. What do I know
about funding I'm just a coder. :)

~~~
maxklein
I don't think 200k will be enough for that number of people over that period
of time. You'll be cash strapped.

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ynniv
Your dollar goes farther in Atlanta than the Valley.

~~~
PStamatiou
I love Atlanta but the angel landscape here is quite different and has seen
better times: <http://techdrawl.com/sig-nificant-blas/>

~~~
noodle
if you were to get sufficient angel investing, and location wasn't an issue,
would you stick with ATL or move to SV or elsewhere?

~~~
PStamatiou
if that was the case i would stay in atlanta for sure. i live right next to a
huge park (Piedmont) with my black lab. i often go running through the park
with her, spend time out there on sunny days and so on. it can't get better
than this for a dog owner! that and there are lots of women in Atlanta :) - a
top 10 city for singles the last few years. I believe it was #1 in 2008 by
Citysearch or some other site. Can't say the same about San Francisco.

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jasonlbaptiste
Another interesting spreadsheet would be: Are you looking to fund stuff / have
you funded stuff? Not sure how you go about the contact info being placed
there. Then again, venture hacks has the contact info on their list.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Make it :). Contact info could be the same through HN username; people can
decide what to put in their HN profile.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
I went ahead and created a form for this and posted to HN:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1104674>

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wesley
I see you've made the spreadsheet uneditable. A wise choice! (Users that have
seen the previous posting will agree)

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Yeah, I was very disappointed with that posting, which I ended up deleting
after 15min. Every cell I wrote was deleted, and at least one person put up
porn on it.

~~~
TrevorJ
Is that coming from HN users or is there some sort of public search for public
documents on Google that funnels trolls to it?

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epi0Bauqu
I'm pretty positive it was from HN users. I've shared other spreadsheets in
the past publicly and never seen random people on them beyond the community
with which I shared them.

~~~
TrevorJ
If that is the case it is a disappointing development.

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suzyperplexus
I know StartupList is on here, but Venture Hacks just started an AngelList
<http://venturehacks.com/angellist> . It's a good way to see what types of
startups specific Angels are interested in.

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Cyndre
I can at least say its working. Within the past hour of my post my cable
monitoring site has been checked out by comcast and cox cable. Thanks for
making it easy to post what I have done so far.

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peteforde
"If we capture only 1% of this market... we'll be rich!"

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matt1
Reading these gives you somewhat of an idea of what it must be like for pg and
team to read through YC applications. it's amazing how similar many of them
are, which I imagine is part of the reason why YC started doing Requests for
Startups.

The number of ways to describe _innovation_ is also a bit amusing:

 _knocking down the barriers_

 _freaking huge_

etc

I wonder if investors are numb to this?

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Brushfire
Please add a city/state or location column.

Many angel investors around the country will only look at deals they are
physically near, since the value is in mentoring and connections, not just $$.

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cookiecaper
This seems like something better off with private results, right?

~~~
epi0Bauqu
It's for the HN community. Plenty of investors hang out here. Of course, I
don't know all of them. Hence, public.

I kept the fields to a minimum so serious conversations could happen off-
spreadsheet.

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jayair
Applied with <http://thecadmus.com>. Thanks for setting it up!

