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Tech Making Traditional VCs Obsolete

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10 pointswaleedka5 comments

Somehow angelsoft has slipped under my radar. This is seriously cool, I am soo applying.

Basically, this is one place where a lot of angels congregate, attracted by convenient deal-tracking software and a social network. Entreprenuers can discover angles and apply in a centralized fashion. This aligns with PG's vision of turning demo day into an auction, it's not quite there yet but it's on the right track - creating a global market place for the statups and capital.

Thank you waleedka for posting this.

Why couldn't a http://www.donorschoose.org/ be put together for startups? Since the costs are so small, why couldn't a website be created that says, I want to sell a 1000 shares of my company for 10% of the equity, and the shares are $20 each, and this is my business plan?

Actually, thinking about it there are two big problems. First is that I'm suggesting a community made of anyone, not just accredited investors.

Secondly, I understand that being new, small and unknown in a marketplace is important. As Matt Maroon put it:

"There was a section in the application that asked founders something like “why would your project be hard for one of your competitors to clone.” Our answer was that technologically it wouldn’t. And unless you’re building something like Zenter or maybe Loopt, that’s going to be largely true for you too. There isn’t much Yahoo or Google programmers couldn’t pump out in a relatively short period of time, and anyone who says otherwise is either lying or delusional.

"And that’s fine, because we can all name ten times they’ve made a technologically equal (or even superior) clone of some popular website only to watch it flounder. So explain why, even if they did clone you, you really wouldn’t be hurt by it."

So obviously Google could scour the site and find ideas.

Having said all that why isn't there community based, micro finance type (think kiva) of website for web startups? Would that work?

I think it's an innovative idea, but speaking form just a tiny bit of personal experience, buying and selling pieces of companies (excluding the stock market) can be terribly confusing. Am I buying 10% for my $20,000? Then why is it, one year later (and more stock has been issued/other investors have come in), I have less than 10%?

It could be possible, and thinking about it, it's might even be largely educational for people who became interested in it. But getting people up to speed on the procedures and terminology may be initially difficult.

> Then why is it, one year later (and more stock has been issued/other investors have come in), I have less than 10%?

Because other stock has been issued.

Companies can sell "new stock" or "old stock". Selling new stock dillutes. Selling old stock doesn't.

Suppose that you own 20 out of 200 shares. If the company sells 100 of those 200 shares, you still own 10% because the number of shares hasn't changed. If the company creates 100 and sells new shares, you now own 6.66% because the number of shares has changed to 300.

I was using the question to illustrate a point, but thank you for that wonderful explanation :)

I simply meant to point out that there are things that are not immediately obvious to people who are not actively involved in this area, and it may take several dozen well-written paragraphs such as yours to bring people up to speed.

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