How to get the most out of AngelList: As a VC and as an Entrepreneur

I love AngelList. I truly believe it is disrupting the way early stage deals are being discovered and funded.

When I was with BlackBerry Partners Fund (now Relay Ventures), I used AngelList to virtually meet and screen tons of companies. I set up Super Fridays for myself, filling my mornings and/or afternoons with back-to-back 30 minute calls with 10-12 companies. I really recommend this to any young VC looking for both dealflow and honing their game. The velocity and juxtaposition of all these entrepreneurs, pitches, and companies really taught me how to evaluate deals along the VC spectrum:

(NO) polite and immediate no thank you
(NOT YET) check back with traction
(NOT SURE) send me your pitch deck so I can another set of eyes on this
(POTENTIALLY) let me bring this up at the next Monday partner meeting and see if someone bites
(YES) holy moly let me get John Albright right now

All told, I probably screened 150-200 companies every three months on AngelList alone. Ultimately, after all those Super Fridays, the firm funded two great companies: PubNub and ClearFit.

Now as I sit somewhat on the other side, running Extreme Startups, I am spending time trying to get VCs to view our companies’ AngelList profiles. To help figure out what companies should be doing on AngelList to help maximize their exposure, we at Extreme Startups recently had a session with Ash Fontana from AngelList to get his advixe. Ash shared some best practices that I’d like to share with our community. His advice included a lot of great tips and some common sense details that time-crunched entrepreneurs might glance over.

Company Profiles

Fill it out completely. All the sections and tabs. Comprehensive profiles are definitely the best so that there is both pertinent and substantive information. One good tip is for the Founder Bios – include university info as well as some investors search for key schools.
Be open / generous with information. Specifically for the Fundraising tab, the Deal Terms should be filled out. You don’t need to put valuation, but some indication helps investors looking for certain price ranges or structures (convertible note vs. equity).
Use graphics – slides, screenshots, graphs, and videos to make a static page pop.

Key tips to stand out

State the most original thing or function your product and company does.
Information about the market size is key.
Name something extraordinary about your company or founders.
State the hardest problem you solve.

How do you get featured?

For those lucky four startups on the feature page on the front page of AngelList, what is the process to get there? It’s curated by Ash, who uses a number of different tools to track interest and traction. Note that there are now over 80,000 startups on AngelList, with ~100 getting added every day. Only five get featured per week – so only top 0.5% have the chance to be featured. We are lucky to have our alumnus Granify on the feature page! ShopLocket, SimplyUs, and Verelo all have great profiles as well (shameless plug).

So what should you do after your profile is up?

Be active. It’s a social network. Start and engage in conversations. Follow interesting companies, entrepreneurs, and investors. Comment on people’s status updates. Refer interesting deals to other people.
Be proactive. Reach out to investors and advisors. Ask for referrals and recommendations!
Match your offline activity to your online profile. Add an advisor or investor? Make sure you AL profile reflects that. Have your network post and share your traction and successes online!

Other AngelList resources recently launched

AngelList Docs is in beta, but only for US incorporated companies for now. It’s a great resource to close your deal online, industry standard docs and no legal fees.
AngelListTalent recently launched and helps startups recruit, and talent identify great jobs. It uses a double opt-in structure, so you only get shown the jobs of the companies you follow. It’s a great resource for recruiting.

Hacking AngelList articles

Lastly, Ash mentioned he loved and supported the hacking AngelList posts. Somewhat analogous to the black art of gaming the iTunes stores, there are ways to succeed on AngelList outside of what is included in this post. I just googled and found a couple of hits. There are the most useful imho.

http://www.seedstagecapital.com/2011/07/hacking-angel-list.html
http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/63010/Raising-Money-On-AngelList-21-Tips-From-Two-Active-Angels.aspx
http://danielodio.com/how-to-hack-your-funding-by-naval-ravikant-of-angellist
http://wensing.tumblr.com/post/11062968069/hacking-angellist-or-social-proof

Final thoughts

I really hope more Canadian companies use and publish on AngelList, Gust, and others. It’s a great way to get your profile out to Canadian, US, and international investors. Not to mention its a great way to help entire cities and regions get noticed for great deal flow. Maybe some young VC down south will start arranging their own Canadian Super Fridays…

Please follow me on AngelList! (and Twitter).

7 Ways To Rock a Startup Accelerator Mentor Day

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur and marketing executive April Dunford who is currently the head of Enterprise Market Strategy for Huawei. April specializes in brining new products to market including messaging, positioning, market strategy, go-to-market planning and lead generation. She is one of the leading B2B/enterprise marketers in the world and we’re really lucky to be able to share here content with you. Follow her on Twitter Follow @aprildunford or RocketWatcher.com. This post was originally published in August 31, 2012 on RocketWatcher.com.

I spent the day yesterday at FounderFuel for their Mentor Day. If you aren’t familiar with FounderFuel they are a very successful startup accelerator based in Montreal. And what a day it was – 8 startups pitched and then did roundtable breakout sessions with over 50 mentors including VC’s, angel investors, entrepreneurs and senior executives. Here’s my mentor’s perspective on how a startup can really get the most out of a day like that:

1/ Pick your Target Mentors Ahead of Time: 50 mentors is a lot and they represented a wide cross section of folks that have deep experience in different consumer and business markets, and have a range of skills from technical expertise to sales, marketing, finance, and legal experience. Selecting a subset of the mentors with experience relevant to your business will help you target your discussions.A handful of the teams that needed marketing help reached out to me by email before the day and that helped to make sure that we connected at the session which I thought was pretty smart.

2/ Ask for Feedback on your Pitch: The mentors are both experienced pitch artists, and listen to pitches a lot. What better folks to give feedback on what worked and what didn’t work with the pitch you just gave? In this case the companies are all still in the early stages of the accelerator program so it’s a great time to get feedback that will improve the ultimate pitch you give on demo day. The feedback will also give you a feel for the differences in what an Angel investor might be looking for over what the more traditional VC’s are looking for in a pitch. “Tell me one thing that would have made my pitch better” or “What was missing from my pitch?” would both be great ways to start that discussion.

3/ Ask for Specific Help: The mentors are ready and willing to help but they can’t guess what you need. Coming with a set of specific requests helps shape the discussion in a way that is most helpful to you. Don’t be afraid to ask for specific introductions – even if the folks in the room don’t have the answers you need, chances are they know someone who does.

4/ Listen, Ask Questions (and Filter later): – The mentors yesterday came from really different backgrounds and had worked in a broad range of industries (consumer, gaming, retail, enterprise, financial services). Sure we’re all smart folks but you wouldn’t believe how different our opinons were about questions the startups were asking. For example, at my session with Openera – a tool for automatically organizing files and attachments – we got into a discussion about selling to consumers versus enterprises as a starting point. I ALWAYS tilt toward enterprises when people ask me that because I know/love enterprise sales. The mentor beside me, Yona Shtern, the CEO from Beyond the Rack on the other hand thought selling B2C (or B2C2B) was just fine. Only Openera can decide who’s got smarter advice for their business (yeah OK, in this case it’s probably the smarty-pants Beyond the Rack guy but hey you get what I’m trying to say here). Another example – in the discussion with InfoActive (a very cool tool that lets you easily create beautiful interactive data visualizations), I immediately saw the applicability to creating interactive marketing materials. I’m a marketer, that’s the obvious use case for someone like me. The mentor beside me (James Duncan, CTO at Inktank) on the other hand saw the value in selling to IT departments that needed a way to easily create good looking dashboards to help IT communicate to the business side of the house. That’s a great use case that a marketing person like me would be unlikely to immediately think of. Both ideas might be worth investigating but only InfoActive can really decide that. Avoiding “mentor whiplash”, as the FounderFuel gang refers to it, is a critical skill for startups in accelerators that have deep rosters of active mentors. Remember too that time is limited so you don’t want to waste it having a long debate with a single mentor over a specific point. Listen, probe a bit if you need to, and then move on. You can always schedule follow-on time with a specific mentor to explore an idea later.

5/ Take Notes: You put a couple of CEO’s a VC, a senior exec and a CTO at a table together and guess what happens? We talk. A lot. Not only that but the conversation moves very quickly from one point of view to the next. Some teams were recording the sessions but the room was loud (did I mention we talk a lot?) and figuring out who said what later might be a challenge by voice alone. Having someone taking notes is a good idea to make sure that you’re capturing ideas as they are flowing.

6/ Work the Edge Time: By far the best way to get 1 on 1 time with a mentor yesterday was to do it over the break or over lunch. That also gives the mentor a chance to ask questions they might not get a chance to in a round table session.

7/ Don’t Forget Everyone’s a Potential Investor : The VC’s are easy to spot (and there were a lot of them there) but most of the mentors I talked to are also doing a bit of angel investing as well. For companies at this stage anyone that’s willing to invest time with your company might also be likely to invest cash as well.

So there’s my advice. I’m sure the other mentors all have different opinions – yep, we’re funny that way.

Thoughts about accelerators

Some rights reserved by archer10 (Dennis)

Most people love to just give advice as if it’s set in stone. These thoughts cannot be applied to every startup, use your own judgement and do you own due diligence.

Rewind to 2009, we had a stellar year. We had created Tether.com from a simple idea to millions of dollars in revenue. I evaluated various aspects of this success and realized we were paid huge dividends because we made a significant difference in the way people were able to work. At the young age of 21, I faced two options:

Retire
Continue creating disruptive products and change the world

Luckily (or unfortunately) I took the second option, creating products that would hopefully disrupt markets. I decided the market I wanted to disrupt was computer programming.

Some rights reserved by archer10 (Dennis)

Being from Nova Scotia, a small province not really known for its stellar technology, I was faced with two options:

Fund my own startup out of pocket, or
try to raise money.

We’re known for lobsters, which is a far stretch from computer programming. Raising cash locally was a stretch, particularly given the very early stage of the business. And while it feels like a feeding frenzy in the Bay area, most US-based investors wouldn’t know where Nova Scotia is on the map (while Jevon [LinkedIn, @jevon] is trying to change that, outside of Boston many might still have a hard time finding us) and putting capital into an early company in a location they don’t know felt very unlikely.

The best option was to self-fund Compilr with the expection to go from initial idea through to revenue much like we had previously done with Tether.com. We had an idea, we had a team that was capable of building, we had users signing up to use the service (our user base had grown 13x in a 3 month period), but we had no revenue. And we were running out of cash. Getting people to pay turned out to be very challenging. More challenging than it was with Tether.com.

At some point, I realized that I needed help. The help probably wasn’t cash. Raising millions of dollars in funding, wouldn’t solve our problem. The money could extend our runway, give us more time to increase our output on features, bug fixes, but if no one would pay for the product – it didn’t matter.

If money alone wasn’t the answer, maybe it was accelerators that could help (I hear there might be an incubator/accelerator bubble or something). I applied to Y-Combinator with a video from my beautiful rented apartment in Dominican Republic, but ultimately was turned down. I applied to a local entrepreneur competition, Compilr placed 3rd but sadly there was no financial benefit. At this stage the product went to the back-burner, the development team focused on other projects, the question was: what to do next?

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” – Wayne Gretzky

An angel investor introduced me to Seedcamp. And while Seedcamp was Europe focused, they had a strong portfolio of very early stage software companies. Long story short: I applied, invited to pitch in New York, and was accepted to the program. Going to an incubator was a big decision. I was getting mixed advice from my mentors, with some mentors telling me “you are an idiot for valuing your company so low” and others saying “Seedcamp had over-valued the company given the traction”.

It’s a hard decision, but ultimately I decided that the small percentage I was giving up Seedcamp was a good fit for Compilr and me. Seedcamp was providing value to help Compilr, and if I was successful we could return the favor so they can invest in other entrepreneurs. It felt good, like a fair trade.

I’ve determined that startup accelerators can provide returns even beyond the bottom line (or the post-money valuations). Here is what entrepreneurs should expect from an incubator:

Validation: When an accelerator says, we like your idea and your team and want to give you a small bit of cash, this is significant validation. I think this is the death row for most startups. If your team doesn’t get any validation, will it just become a “back-burner” project. Accelerators can help provide entrepreneurs early, meaningful validation.
Exposure: Always insure that your accelerator is able to provide you with adequate exposure. Every time we were involved in a Seeedcamp event we saw about a 30% increase in traffic, which was easily identifiable from those particular events. Accelerators are press whores, they want just as much exposure as you. Weasel your way into anything that could be related to you.
Accountability/Focus: Being a single-founder with a crazy idea, accountability sometimes goes on the back-burner. As a founder/CEO sometimes you have ideas that are completely inaccurate and have no foundation. Having a team that can slap you around a bit, when you decide you want to pivot from an online IDE to an online garden center is a great asset.
They don’t solve your problems.: My reason for joining an accelerator was simply, if I get enough smart people looking at my business, I’d get to revenue faster. The fact is you could have the most brilliant advisers or mentors helping you, but they still can’t solve your problems. They just aren’t connected into the industry like you. In the end you need to make strategic decisions on where you want to go.
Competitiveness: Joining an accelerator, is always competitive. Being apart of an accelerator provides a degree of competitiveness. When your teammate just raised $910k from top US investors and you haven’t done shit, you instantly feel like you want to go out and raise $2m.
Prepare to insult everyone: The worse part of having really great mentors, is when you are in a rut, they’ll tell you “they told you so”. If you didn’t follow a mentor’s advice they may shun you, they may refuse to give you advice on the “basis that you don’t follow it”. The biggest problem if you take one mentors advice, you will insult another.

Can I help? If you think I can help, shoot me an email: patrick.hankinson@gmail.com