brendonjason

Yes. They are running scared of the growing threat of the Ylluminati. But since they have 100% of all the deals, they also seem to co-invest(?!?).

These anxious (yet all-powerful) group of angels and this unstoppable new seed-stage prominence. They form a closed loop. A loop closed off to venture capitalists and angels not at that meeting ... which is basically everybody.

Except Michael. He got away with his life intact and lived to warn us all.

Actually, I don't know what's scarier - the supposed collusion or the subtle dread that Y Combinator is supposed to evoke in my mind as I ponder the possibility of this event being true.

If it is true - maybe we should be side with these poor angels and help them before it's too late.

To paraphrase Woodrow Wilson, "Since I entered (angel investing), I have chiefly had (angel investor's) views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the (Valley), in the Field of (IT) and (Venture Capital), are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it."

That something ... is Y Combinator.

Um ... no. The dark side doesn't suit you, Y Combinator.

Please stop.

I'm sorry. Maybe I've had too many beers tonight. But this is the kind of scenario that only comes out of the mind of a silicon valley PR firm.

(please don't downvote me too much ... I'd like to get above 100 karma points just once for a change! Noooo!)

If I have an investing club and we come to define an investment approach, say, what stocks we like and what we think they should be valued at, are we colluding to price fix the market? If I think a company is over priced and I am in charge of executing trades for my investing club, whose members unanimously agreed not to buy the stock in question until it fell down say, $20 more in price - are we colluding? Yes. Colluding to price fix? No. We're simply colluding not to participate in the buy side. That may or may not lead to sellers slowly changing their asking price. But that's a two-way street. I don't see the illegality according to anti-trust. Now if every major instututional house/hedge/mutual/pension fund that owned that stock got together and colluded to refuse to SELL us any stock until we agreed to their higher price, that I understand is illegal. They are fixing the price literally. But I don't see how us refusing to participate in a transaction on the buy side is illegal whether we have 5 members or 5 million.

Saying that the angels are colluding to price fix buys into Michael's assertion that "together, the men in that room account for nearly 100% of all angel deals". That means that their "deals" are the commodity in question, and they are free to do as they wish. If it's their money, then it's hard to make the claim that their money is the market. There's certainly more money in the world than theirs.

IANAL(E), but this scenario would seem to be more of a concern if startups in Silicon valley got together over dinner to deny deals that didn't offer similar terms and prices in dollars for securities of all startups represented at said dinner simultaneously.

As for angels fixing the "price of their money" I don't understand how antitrust applies to this anymore than it would to, say, how LIBOR is determined.

If antitrust applies to colluding on the dollar amount to be paid OUT instead of price asked for money coming in, then if I start a boycott of something (colluding to pay $0) am I guilty of violating antitrust laws?

As I understand it (not much, I admit), antitrust applies to goods and services, not cost of money. If antitrust applied to cost of money, the Federal Reserve would not exist since it's basically an extension of the member banks that make up its institutional board of directors (not board of governers). All they do is get together and fix the price of money to be printed and lent out to member banks.

Also, this whole "I stumbled in on a secret meeting of powerful men conspiring to start a revolution" thing is somewhat suspect; throughout history this gambit, if it actually happened that way, is usually either desperate grab at 15 minutes of fame (which seems unlikely given Michael's popularity), an attempt to gain instant credibility on some esoteric but useful new subject ("I was the only outsider privvy to what happened there, so you can trust me") or, unfortunately, a cynical move feigned by the men in the room to inspire hasty and possibly faulty reactionary stances by the supposed target of their "envy".

I could be wrong though. I just can't believe guys who are careful enough to get to such a position in life would all simultaneously get so careless. On the same day. In the same place.

I find this somewhat dubious; I wasn't there, but if I was one of those guys, I'm not sure I'd continue the "evil meeting" after Michael stumbled in uninvited. If he came after the meeting ended, why weren't they all "just about to leave."

Having said that, I'm sorry if my confusion gives a way my ignorance of the subject, but are these angels selling anything to a marketplace? I thought angels invested their money. If that's the case, aren't they colluding to the terms of their buying, as a group? Or at least to loosely manage the terms of buying? If that is illegal, why does it apply to angel investing but not, say, Groupon? What I don't understand is what is their "price" that they are colluding to "fix"? I thought antitrust was for the collusion for the price asked, not price willing to pay.

Nice. Now go to http://www.culturedcode.com, get a demo of "Things" and piggy back their award-winning design layout and make a web-based version of it. A good start is to one-up them and make sub-tasks within tasks or task notes, something they refuse to do for some reason.

But good.

So it would seem that creativity trumps the massive budgets and state of the art technology that are the hallmarks of just about all modern day SciFi flicks; hmmm ... wonder if that principle is somehow applicable to the startup scene?