sinzone

"Founders leaving" has been always an hard question/answer to say in the short term.

That's exactly my fear.

But that variation in returns will be dwarfed by the variation caused by which startup you pick. Which means investing with no cap would be business as usual for angels.

Yes, I agree with the no cap thing. Yet I think smaller discounts mean that you'll get smaller returns whether you pick a "rocket" startup or a "tortoise" one.

How a small angel investor can invest in conv. debt. without cap and discount? Maybe the no cap/discount are only for SV/Yuri but I guess that in any case startups (even if they need more than 150k) will feel more confortable with some nice cash in the bank, thus they will become more picky and will ask for hyper-strong favorable terms that not anyone will be able to afford (good for entrepreneurs). Therefore a lot of small angel investors can't invest anymore in YC startups (I guess YC will push out 100 startups/year - for sure a big chunk). Thus, they will go somewhere and the one who were able to invest, were able to invest at huge valuations whit less nice terms, so they will get smaller future returns (bad for the future of the ecosystem).

To conclude, my concerns are not about now but about the future cause there is a risk that we'll have less angels, then less money available for entrepreneurs. I may be wrong though...

(obviously we're talking only about investments into YC startups; investors can always invest elsewhere. So when I said "out of biz" it was more about the "YC related biz")

Don't know if that will be your need since all depend from the service itself if it is useful or not. But we have to bear in mind that Twitter has 75% of its traffic coming from its APIs, while eBay has 8 billion of worth items pushed through the marketplace via APIs. That's the future, especially when the internet of things will come, at that point your toaster will have an API as well.