201–210 of 237 posts
I think you can safely say you are an intermediate or advanced angel.
I guess junior is opposite to senior. I don't sit on boards, I don't lead deals, etc.
Hi Joshua Would you invest in a pure mobile play (i.e. Something you needed a specific type of phone for)? Reason i'm asking is that I quite often hear "yeah but what about everyone who doesn't have an XXX". Cheers, Einar
I am not fond of secondary franchises. If you are going to live in the shade of one tree, it'd better be a huge fucking tree. I am also not fond of temporary opportunities. If you are doing X for Android because there's a successful X for iPhone and nobody has done it yet, then it's not a scaleable business.
It's scalable as long as you can keep finding new Xes indefinitely.
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I guess junior is opposite to senior. I don't sit on boards, I don't lead deals, etc.
Why don't you lead? I found when raising money that a lot of angels are like that. Is it just a time thing? If you found a startup you really loved, would you lead then, or just try to get someone else to?
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> Entrepreneurs need to understand that [ ... ] or I will stab their eyes out. Please fill in the blank. Communication is key. If you want people to do things, you must communicate in ways that facilitate the action. Make it easier for me as I am bandwidth constrained. > What is the most broken thing about angel investing? I haven't been doing this long enough to have a sense for that, which is surprising. I am frequ…
Funny story: When I see names in the press that look familiar, I often check to see if I've communicated with them. I saw an article about a company that raised money, and checked, and sure enough I had talked with them about it. The entrepreneur had written ten paragraphs. I sent a "sounds interesting, send screenshots or a prototype" and they wrote ten more paragraphs. I didn't follow up. However, smarter people th…
I think that delicious is really awesome. I still use it pretty much every day, even though if anything the product has almost declined in quality over the past few years. It feels like Delicious could have been the start of something even larger than a bookmark service, it's my primary resource for finding specific content (eg: rails + tutorial, photo + howto, etc.) I'm aware that that is a fairly large technical ba…
I agree with you. I noticed something about Delicious: when I add a URL, it's rare that someone else hasn't already bookmarked it. That means that Delicious has, to a first approximation, everything interesting on the web . All organized by humans in a rich way. That's an astonishingly valuable data set. Relative to that value, the use that's being made of it is so low it's criminal. Even if they aren't capable of ev…
Three questions: 1) Why do you find it harder to code these days? Does that bother you? It seems like you're still keeping up with a lot of python stuff from your delicious tagging. 2) Why hasn't anyone advanced the ball past delicious with bookmarking? I'm still a delicious nut, but I really want good search tied into it. Is there no business model or no real use to the data? 3) Do you believe in the Ron Conway styl…
I don't know. Too many distractions and anxieties? There's a lot of noise in my head. Yes, it bothers me.
> Why hasn't anyone advanced the ball past delicious with bookmarking?
I don't know. I should restart Muxway (the delicious predecessory)
> Do you believe in the Ron Conway style of angel investing?
I don't know enough about Ron's model to make a judgement. All we know is that it generates more "buy" decisions. I think that having a larger portfolio is stronger. Sometimes I do participate in follow-on rounds.
Whats the best place to raise $200k for an early-stage internet startup. A single angel? A group of angels? A seed fund?
I guess anything that works. In my experience, companies raising less than 500k are making a huge mistake.
i.e., do you invest within your range based on your feelings about the investment, or just how oversubscribed the round is?
For me, a $10k investment and a $25k investment would take roughly the same amount of thought and time, so really it's just a 2.5x bigger payoff if you win.
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I agree with you. I noticed something about Delicious: when I add a URL, it's rare that someone else hasn't already bookmarked it. That means that Delicious has, to a first approximation, everything interesting on the web . All organized by humans in a rich way. That's an astonishingly valuable data set. Relative to that value, the use that's being made of it is so low it's criminal. Even if they aren't capable of ev…
pretty much every change Yahoo has done has been a step backwards, except for changing the url to delicious.com
1) How aggressive are you in getting deals done? Are you more like "lets have a chat, sign here" or more like "okay, call me if you ever need funding."?
2) I'm actually working on a site similar to Delicious, http://www.howl.com. Its not quite bookmarking, we call it link blogging. What do you make of the market? Thanks