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AngelList Stack

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Looks good, just curious why they didn't do it 5 years ago when this stuff was still hard.

* Incorporate with Stripe Atlas (just did it for the 2nd time and it was even smoother then the first)

* Mercury bank is incredible, I'm sure Blue Ridge would be a step down.

* Carta for equity

* Fundraising would be interesting, but PartyRound seems to be moving fast here.

Agreed. It's hard enough to go after an established player with a few years' head start in a single sector, but Angel is simultaneously tackling like 4-6 of them. All the best to them.

so what does mercury bank offer me? I visited the site and cannot find anything that seems like a massive advantage over some big name bank.

I had a horrible experience with Mercury bank. I’m a US citizen, but living in a foreign country (which is a US ally…). Mercury had no problem opening my account - but then a few months later froze my account for a week with no heads up. All my transactions just suddenly stopped working, no explanation. Support was completely unhelpful. Eventually they closed my account because of my geolocation and let me transfer the $ that was held out, but only after serious harm to the credibility of my business (late invoices, having to explain to partners that my bank account was frozen - resulting in loss of a partnership that would have resulted in a few hundred K in revenue).

Now I use a major US bank and could not be happier. Startup banks are a huge risk to business, I will never use one again.

I had a very similar problem. Don't rely on fake banks. Funds frozen after one "red flag." But on the other hand if you have a very standard and non-controversial business you're unlikely to have issues.

I operated my Mercury account as a non resident with zero issues, all I did was have a mailing address in the US. Did you have one? I don't think they flagged any of my activity from India as such.

Yep. I have a personal US address and obviously a business address. They had no problems opening the account.

Disclosure: I am the current head of growth at Mercury

- Mercury is online first and built for online companies... that means you never have to go in person to sign documents, we have APIs/integrations that connect to the tools you likely use for your business, etc.

- Many of the bigger banks charge fees or have otherwise poor experiences (wires, maintenance, minimum balances)that Mercury is better at: free accounts, no minimum balance, free wires, and just a general attitude of no-fees-wherever-possible

- The design and craft of the product experience around Mercury is super high - little details like transactions filters, easily being able to copy any account/routing number or auto-filling addresses, etc, make a huge difference when you compare side by side.

- Lots of other reasons, but I'll wrap with we're just getting started =)

But don't take my word for it - search Twitter (https://twitter.com/search?q=bankmercury) and see what our customers say

what you should really do, is solve the lending problem. as a startup founder it has been impossible to get a corporate credit card without personal guarantees, even if I asked for a low dollar limit (e.g. 10K). in europe, that was never a problem for me. not giving a personal guarantee has nothing to do with being a scammer or shady person, but preventing the piercing of the limited liability aspect of the company you are founding. also, do not ask founders to deposit collateral to solve this problem. that's just lame and uncreative. VC funding or proven revenue should also not be demanded.

all of that loses to freezing an account and making your customer lose business, right? I can imagine having a bank account frozen, how much money and customers you can lose because of this.

As both a founder and a hobby angel investor, I don't think this is something I'd use. AngelList has terrible UX and it's never clear how things work. Combined with slow customer support, I can't imagine how this would be better than using the best of breed for each part of banking, cap table management, legal, etc.

I agree. I've had terrible experiences with AngelList products. They seem to love shipping mvp versions of new things but not scaling them or even figuring out the major issues with them. They screwed up k-1s for me two years in a row, which cost me a ton of money with accountants to fix.

a website is not a product

There is an advantage to having it one place. I would guess they will be successful if they provide a good UX.

Frankly I’ve been surprised for a few years that they hadn’t launched a Carta competitor.

"Stack" is for business ops what GitHub and AWS lambda did for devops.

Sure you can roll your own and if you've done this in the past and are both opinionated and experienced you can re-use your know-how and you'll be fine. Everyone else is probably better off with sensible defaults and a platform that takes care of the details for you.

AngelList will be you deal flow very easily. However, despite the market being very hot, I find the angelList deals to be offensively so. An even bigger problem is that I don't trust the syndicates enough to back these startups, at these prices. It seems like the syndicate leads are very high volume, and the investment mins are very low.

I rather develop relationships and cut bigger seed checks than spray and pray; even if it means I do way less investing. I'd also say, my favorite thing about angel investing is developing a rapport with the founders and helping, when I can.

Anything like this for EU?

And there it is. I walked through the process until the document page and the disclaimer. No gambling apps.

What the heck? It's a massive industry and legalized gambling is growing massively.

So disappointing.

I'm curious, why do you want to work in the gambling industry? It exploits addiction and ruins lives. The tactics used to entice and retain customers are reminiscent of those used by the tobacco industry: the product actively harms those that use it most so there's a continuous need to attract new users.

The apparent growth in the market may be real, but I suspect it will be short lived as governments and authorities stem the advertising, and investors turn towards opportunities that are less ethically unpleasant. Here in the UK every other ad on late night commercial TV is for gambling apps or services, while consumer-affairs radio programmes are exposing a rising tide of financial ruin fuelled by debt, low wages, under-employment, with gambling never far away.

If I understand your comment, gambling is explicitly disclaimed by AL's Stack. Surely that's another signal for you to consider. Many organisations are shifting away from unethical investments (for whatever definition of ethics they adopt). Gambling seems to have passed its peak some years ago, both in terms of opportunity and social acceptability.

So I'm genuinely curious. You're at angel/incorporation stage. Why aim for the gambling industry?

>Gambling seems to have passed its peak some years ago, both in terms of opportunity and social acceptability.

In the US, to me, it seems sports gambling is priming for take off. Many states are legalizing it and you see gambling odds/lines on ESPN now. Many NFL stadiums are about to launch in-game gambling operations. It used to never be acceptable in the US to be out front about sports gambling but the worm has turned.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I suspect this boom will be relatively short-lived. Sure, plenty will get rich off it, but plenty more will be harmed by it, and that harm will fuel the push-back.

The US has the luxury of being able to look at other countries who are ahead of the curve to see how things may pan out.

My broader question to GP is why get involved in such an industry? It does more harm than good, and the writing is very predictably on the wall.

This is my third digital startup attempt.

My first was an education technology platform to replace 4th through 8th grade Textbooks. I found out the hard way that the education publishing business is nearly impossible to disrupt.

My second was a context-search engine, but machine learning killed that idea ... fast.

Mach9Poker is just a simple app that allows anyone to build and test poker strategies against other strategies running automatically in the cloud. Pretty harmless and may even help some poker players make more money and lose less...so all in all, I think a good thing to reduce the downsides of playing poker for money. There is a potential pivot to making it an actual gambling app, but that's only if the initial app makes a TON of headway.

I'm also having fun designing and building it. That's what entrepreneurship is all about.

> Gambling seems to have passed its peak some years ago, both in terms of opportunity and social acceptability.

I'm not sure if you live in the US, but it's only gaining traction here in the States. It's becoming more socially accepted, widespread, and losing its stigma. Whether betting on the spread on sports games, betting on specific players' performances, season outcomes, or especially, fantasy sports.

You can't watch an NFL game for ten minutes these days without seeing an ad for DraftKings, FanDuel, MGM (lots of their ads this year), etc., so if you think gambling has passed its peak, I wonder if you don't watch much sports and it may not be targeted at you.

He will be non US, elsewhere in the world gambling is so infested in our sports that football teams in the UK for instance are looking at moving away from gambling sponsorship. Only they can't because the money paid is just so high. There is alot of pushback now from fans due to the growing amount of children that are picking up gambling habits.

https://www.lbbonline.com/news/kids-ask-can-we-have-our-ball...

> I'm not sure if you live in the US

Erm... as I mentioned, UK :)

> It's becoming more socially accepted, widespread, and losing its stigma.

My contention is that this may be short lived. It's an industry which causes harm. These have a habit of receding significantly after growth.

For good or ill, Americans don't like being told what to do. If a person wants to gamble their life away, that's their business. If a person wants to drink themselves into oblivion, also their business...as long as they aren't hurting anyone else.

I play poker and of course I see people who are addicted to gambling. I feel bad for them. A non-zero pct of poker players manage a bankroll and play at their skill level and occasionally will play above their level to "see if they can do it," and often they get scared and jump back down to a safe level.

The one thing I will absolutely refute is any kind of "morality" assigned to gambling. It's an entertainment choice. I could play golf every other day and spend _way_ more money. I could travel and spend more money. I could enjoy fine dining weekly and spend more money. I might have a wine collection or car collection.

People have passions and gambling is just one of many. If you and others want to live in a cave and not enjoy whatever it is you enjoy that costs money, then I feel bad for you. You're only in this life once. Embrace it like it's your last....with the caveat that you should still be responsible to your family and community.

My app is strictly poker related, which I consider a skill game. Sports Gambling is on the rise. Casinos have never been more popular.

And even the first two phases of my plan have no gambling at all. It's an app to teach people how to build a successful poker strategy.

But it is gambling "adjacent", so I'll be bootstrapping the whole why.

> What the heck?

1) This is stupid on AngelList's part to not say this upfront.

> It's a massive industry and legalized gambling is growing massively.

2) It also a heavily regulated industry and is at the state level. They offer a bank account so it's no surprise they just outright block it. Have you tried to get a bank account for your business outside of this process? It's not that easy.

Using these legal filing/documentation in-a-box services never is as smooth as they advertise. 99/100 you will still need a lawyer and likely will incur more confusion/time/cost as a result of using boilerplate documents for a ton of stuff.

I’ve had a pretty great experience with Clerky

How does the cost compare? Both Angel and Stripe are $500.

$800 for Clerky

Small point only the lawyers will care about - they say they are using Goodwin form documents instead of Orrick form documents. Will make it much nicer to work with companies incorporated on Stack than the others.

This is great! I wish they could have accounting and tax service included as well, which is an enormous pain for first-time founders.

Does anyone know how this compares to Carta?

Carta's most popular functionality (cap table and board management, 409A valuation etc.) represents a subset of what AngelList Stack offers. On the other hand, the former offers some high(er)-end functionality that is currently missing in the latter (including private liquidity, investment scenario modeling, audit compliance options, complex reports as well as pre-IPO and post-IPO support).

Are there similar services (Stripe Atlas, etc.) that let you use a progressive bank like Amalgamated Bank?

I've heard good things about Clerky: https://www.clerky.com/formation

They have streamlined onboarding flows for partner banks like Brex, Mercury, First Republic, etc if you incorporate through them.

Disclaimer: former Brex employee, still have equity.

ngl main appeal here is that azlo, the bank stripe atlas was using, has shut down and I don't want to learn how to replace it

Atlas uses Mercury now and it’s even better than Azlo was, having been a user of both.

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