Or, you can start showing up at cool hacker spaces like the Hacker Dojo or Noise Bridge.

Get a stack of business cards, and hang out at Hackers & Founders </shameless plug> or 106 miles and make a point of having coffee with a couple of cool new people every week.

Join one of the dozens of cool co working spaces in the area. (Avoid Plug and Play).

Spend $9 on the "Pitching hacks" ebook. Best money you'll spend as a founder.

Work on building:

   team with at least one technical founder
   workable product
   refined pitch
   gain some traction
   preferably find one or two people to be your advisors (aka social proof)

And then apply to Angel list.

You need demo day for "social proof" in front of investors and to get a press bump. Demo days aren't essential for funding any more now that Angel List has turned funding into an API.

There's an open ecosystem in place for this, and it's improving. There are still a number of places in the early stage ecosystem that really suck, however. And, that's why incubators are still able to charge 6% of your equity for fixes to that.

But, some of us are working on fixing these problems. You'll be hearing more from Hackers & Founders about this in the near future.