Ask HN: Do you need angel funding?
spreadsheets.google.com
spreadsheets.google.com
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
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 ;-)
We're also glad to intro good startups to angels: http://venturehacks.com/startuplist
They received some funding for http://www.backupify.com/, which allows you to backup/restore data from social websites (Facebook, Twitter, etc...).
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.
"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")
--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.
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.
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.
I've also heard: "If you ask for money, they'll give you advice. If you ask for advice, they'll give you money."
I've seen people point to Section 5: http://www.law.uc.edu/CCL/33Act/sec5.html
Just wondering if this is for info purposes only? or, are you actually going to promote it somewhere?
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. :)
http://www.activehomepro.com/activehome-pro.html (audio alert!)
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?
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 $$.
I kept the fields to a minimum so serious conversations could happen off-spreadsheet.