Has AngelList killed early-stage VCs?
Is there a point to trying to outreach to early-stage VCs when AngelList is far more convenient for startups?
Funding Venture Capital Investors Seed Funding Angellist
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I could take some guesses here, but I would love to see what an actual early stage VC has to say about this! – rbwhitaker 10 years ago
2 Answers
AngelList has actually been very complementary for us at XSeed. It has helped with recruiting and even top off some fundraising for several of our portfolio companies.
While investors from AngelList are usually not as engaged as early stage institutions with items such as recruiting, customer development, strategy, etc., it certainly plays a role in the ecosystem. Entrepreneurs just need to think about what help they need in building a company; money is but one variable.
BTW - I'm such a fan of AngelList I'm writing a case on them for one of my classes at Stanford right now.
Rob Siegel
General Partner, XSeed Capital
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Good points Rob. – Patricia Wright 10 years ago
I second Rob's point. As an early-stage startup, we've found AngelList to be most valuable from a recruiting standpoint because it helped us interface directly with high quality talent without expensive intermediaries. For example, we contracted with a great UI/UX engineer based in Mexico who would have been 2x the price in the Bay Area.
Re: fundraising, our experience was a low signal-to-noise ratio in finding quality investors via AngelList. For our initial round, I wasted a lot of time communicating with investors who weren't serious. Social proof still rules. However, this may be an unavoidable artifact of the inherent opacity in early stage startup investing.
