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Comment by rch | Hacker News Reader

Weird article. AngelList is raising money to make new investments and reports an unrealized 46% IRR, and that somehow makes for a gloomy story.

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The real story is 46% unrealized returns on 2013 syndicate investments. Which is in the upper top quartile of VC.

And A-List, a premium recruiting product for busy companies. That complements our free recruiting product with 180K active candidates.

Down markets are a good time to invest, but we're not anticipating one.

http://angel.co/returns http://alist.co

Care to elaborate on the methodology for how you pick companies? Does AngelList act like its own VC internally?

The fund invests in a subset of syndicated deals. About half of them historically. The investment team consists of experienced investors including Naval (my co-founder). Details here https://angel.co/access-fund

That's a nice advantage you have going -- normally access to the best deals is hard to come by, but by providing the tools by which stand out individuals can achieve leverage in their own deal making through syndication (you're both a technology provider and a channel marketing partner to them), you get their deal flow in return.

46% unrealized returns based on follow on round valuations. Take that as you wish.

Are you seriously suggesting that 46% unrealized gains for a primarily illiquid equity portfolio heading into rate hikes is a good thing?

Unrealized gains are meaningless without liquidity.

The best funds and GPs seem to consistently talk down their unrealized gains as paper gains that need to be steeply discounted. They cast doubt onto themselves willingly, preaching instead to look at cash on cash returns.

Take that as you may.

If it bleeds it leads. If it doesn't bleed make it sound like it does. Positive articles get no clicks.

"china" and "bubble" makes for more clickable headlines?

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