How to Get the Most Out of AngelList: As a VC and 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.

Read the rest of this article at StartupNorth 

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