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.
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.
I attended the last OAF in LA, and highly recommend it. I got to meet lots of interesting entrepreneurs and angels - several of whom had great ideas for our company that we'd never considered.
One of the startups (not mine, unfortunately ;-)) almost ignited a bidding war on the presentation floor! It's the best way to meet a lot of highly qualified angels quickly. We probably met as many angels that night as we did the month before.
Even with the 'post hoc ergo proctor hoc' fallacy in mind, I don't think it's a coincidence we signed a term sheet at a great valuation the next week either ;-)
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")
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.
You're right, but perhaps it is slowly changing. YC et al. have shown funding sparks in small amounts makes sense. That should trickle down eventually.
For me personally, I could see investing in sparks if the teams were right. At that level, you need to really believe in the people.
It's hard when they have no history, but I think connections are possible. In particular, as a hacker entrepreneur, I think I can decently spot other people with that mentality.
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.
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.
IANAL, but I would be careful making such a public post, due to SEC regulations disallowing public notice of equity investment opportunities of private companies.
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.
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.
You should do an Ask HN post anyway, especially since it might land you a co-founder or other motivation from interested users. Once that happens, you'll automatically want to work on it!
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.
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 :-)
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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 $$.
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