Ask HN: Whatever happened to AngelGate? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Whatever happened to AngelGate?

70 pointsZakuzaa14 comments

Ever since TC got acquired by AOL, they haven't posted anything on AngelGate.

Part of the deal? :P

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.

Also known as: Facebook privacy concerns.

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.

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.

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.

Arrington was too busy spending his millions

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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