Blog Profile / Venture Hacks
| URL : | http://venturehacks.com | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Business & Finance / Entrepreneurship | |
| Posts on Regator: | 310 | |
| Posts / Week: | 1.2 | |
| Archived Since: | June 7, 2008 | |
Blog Post Archive
How much traction do I need to raise money?
How much traction do you need to raise $1M? AngelList’s Ash Fontana has the answer on TechCrunch: “If you’re a social company, you’d do well to have at least 100,000 downloads and/or signups before going after your million-dollar round. If you’re running a marketplace or e-commerce company, you should be aiming for around $50K in revenue...
No email at AngelList
We use very little email at AngelList. Most of our communication happens on Yammer, HipChat, Tracker and face-to-face. This probably gets us an 90% reduction in email. If you’re running your company via email, you’re missing out on newer, more effective communications technologies. Yammer is our company mailing list Yammer has nested conversations, search, inline [...]
6-year vesting
Every team member of AngelList is on a 6-year vesting schedule. Including the founders. Why? Because it takes a long time to build something important. And we want everyone to stick around for a long time. Because we want people who are here for the mission, not a payday. Because it sells prospective hires: the [...]
The Entrepreneurial Age
The entrepreneurial age will be as important as the industrial age and the information age. In the industrial and information ages, we learned how to put physics and information to great use. Physics and information were also the basis for an organization’s differentiation and victory. In the entrepreneurial age, physics and information will be replaced [...]
There is no finish line for entrepreneurs
For an entrepreneur, if it is possible to make it better, she must make it better. If it is possible to make it more accessible, she must make it more accessible. If it is impossible to make it better or broader, she innovates. Starting a great Italian restaurant is not entrepreneurship because the proprietors make [...]
1-man startups
The AngelList team is roughly organized into 1-(wo)man startups. That means we expect you to treat your project like a startup. You come up with the idea, do the design, write the code, release it, market it, support customers, collect external and internal feedback and then get to work on the next version. We also [...]
Ask forgiveness, not permission
AngelList “corporate policy” is that team members should ask forgiveness, not permission. We would rather have someone do something wrong than ask permission to do it. Or better, we would rather have someone do something right and not need permission to do it. This is the most common outcome. We would rather have people ship [...]
Startups are here to save the world
“He cares deeply about… the advancement of humankind, and putting the right tools in their hands.” – Laurene Powell Jobs on her husband, Steve Startups aren’t here to change the world, they’re here to save the world—by bringing us innovation that advances humankind. Our universities, labs and garages create enormous amounts of innovation—and there’s more [...]
How to make money with pro rata rights
How to make money with pro rata rights: Exercise the pro rata, no matter the valuation, as long as the company is underpriced. Heuristically: a smart VC is leading an up round in the company. Lead an inside round so you can buy more than just your pro rata. Get a supra pro rata. Alternatively: convince [...]
1.5 Years Of AngelList: 8000 Intros, 400 Investments And That's Just The Data We Can Tell You About
It’s the AngelList centi-sesquicentennial and we want to share some stats with you. After 1.5 years, AngelList has seen… 8,000 intros. An investor has asked for an intro to a startup on AngelList over 8,000 times. 400 investments. A startup has been introduced to an investor and subsequently closed that investor over 400 times. 8 [...]
But I don't want to follow you on Twitter
We post links to the very best startup advice on Twitter at @venturehacks. We read Hacker News, the best blogs, Quora, and everything else startup-related. Then we tweet about the best content we find. But maybe you don’t use Twitter. Or you don’t want to follow us there. Or you hate us. Well then, you [...]
Reading your legal docs
Go read Elad Gil’s You Should Read Every Word of Every Legal Doc. Some docs are too long and boilerplate to read, so this is how I read financing docs: Read and understand everything in the term sheet. But when it comes to the closing docs, ask your lawyer to explain all the terms that [...]
"A" players write the playbook
Eric Paley’s Curve of Talent is a brutal must-read. I’ve remixed it a bit to come up with the following definitions; the word’s are Eric’s, I’ve just re-ordered them: F performers are not at all productive. C performers struggle to competently fill their role, but are somewhat productive with sufficient coaching. Hard to admit, but [...]
You can be so bad at so many things
“You can be so bad at so many things… and as long as you stay focused on how you’re providing value to your users and customers, and you have something that is unique and valuable… you get through all that stuff.” – Mark Zuckerberg
The problem with the Internet startup craze
“The problem with the Internet startup craze isn’t that too many people are starting companies; it’s that too many people aren’t sticking with it.” – Steve Jobs
AngelList at the Centi-Sesquicentennial: 8000 intros, 400 investments, 8 acquired
It’s the AngelList centi-sesquicentennial and we want to share some stats with you. After 1.5 years, AngelList has seen… 8,000 intros. An investor has asked for an intro to a startup on AngelList over 8,000 times. 400 investments. A startup has been introduced to an investor and subsequently closed that investor over 400 times. 8 [...]
Before product-market fit, find passion-market fit
Before product-market fit, find passion-market fit. Building a product is a process, not a discrete action. And the Internet is efficiently arbitraged. Every single simple thing that can be done is being done, or has been done. A lesson of history is that product-market fit is very precise—one wrong tweak or slightly bad timing and [...]
But I don’t want to follow you on Twitter
We post links to the very best startup advice on Twitter at @venturehacks. We read Hacker News, the best blogs, Quora, and everything else startup-related. Then we tweet about the best content we find. But maybe you don’t use Twitter. Or you don’t want to follow us there. Or you hate us. Well then, you [...]
Anatomy of an (un)fundable startup
Naval and Mark Suster recently gave the keynotes at the 7th Founder Showcase. Andrew Chen did a better job of describing Naval’s keynote than I ever will: “People spend a surprising amount of time on things that will contribute little or no value to getting them to a seed round, and this talk is the [...]
Getting Leverage in Hostage Negotiations
“Every time the other party says ‘I want’ in a negotiation, you should hear the pleasant sound of a weight dropping on your side of the leverage scales.” – G. Richard Shell, Bargaining for Advantage Most entrepreneurs don’t understand the power of positive leverage. Here’s a typical situation: After weeks of fund-raising, you find a [...]