“Write your principles in pen but your strategy in pencil.” Now that we’re 18 months in to our first Homebrew fund, and 2014 is coming to an end, thought it could be interesting to share three places we used the pencil eraser thus far. 17 core investments have been made, I’d say our investment model was, […]
So far most of the top funded AngelList Syndicates look, well, not surprising. Capital has lined up behind social proof – angels with notable reach or track record. Additionally, funds such as Foundry Group and Google Ventures have taken their own approaches – the former creating a separate early stage entity, the latter encouraging their […]
You weren’t supposed to be reading this blog post. It was easier to just discuss privately with other investors, but Jason Calacanis tweeted this morning about VCs trying to take entire seed rounds, and so, here it goes. Anecdotally, over the last 3-6 months we’re definitely seeing more examples of larger early stage or multistage […]
Jason Calacanis thinks AngelList Syndicates will hasten the death of the worst performing VCs by further commoditizing capital and giving super angels more $$ to put into deals. I’m a big fan of AngelList (#investor) and Syndicates are going to change things dramatically (previous posts). One aspect that hasn’t been discussed much is how they now […]
Naval confirmed that with Syndicates, AngelList will, over time, show potential syndicate investors the track record of the syndicate lead – how good an investor they are. 1. It will prevent syndicate leads from cherry-picking – ie only syndicating deals where they want to diffuse the risk. 2. AngelList only had start info before – […]
AngelList recently started supporting syndicates, where a lead investor into a startup can solicit for other investors to join them in exchange for carry on the deal (a share of their profits). Some speculated that syndicates would immediately compete to disintermediate traditional VCs and while this may be true over longer periods of time, I’m […]
Recently attended the Upfront Summit, an LA-area tech event put on by Upfront Ventures, which also serves as their annual meeting for LPs to get updated on the fund’s performance. As we approach Homebrew’s one year anniversary we’ll do a smaller scale meeting with our investors in San Francisco. Part of our presentation will be portfolio financials, which, because […]
Social proof is dying as a startup differentiation heuristic during fundraising. Why? A) Blame Angellist for an Advisor Bubble Every company I see has some roster of advisors and/or soft-circled seed investors already committed. It’s gone from evidence of company traction to merely an execution step before hitting ‘publish’ on the Angellist profile. The prominence of […]
