While the ticket sizes (overall $2.5M, $50,000 per investment) may not be large, nice early move by Foundry to coopt a potential competitor into a partner.
Also, given that AngelList has now got $24M in funding from VCs, and VCs are in turn turning angels on AngelList, things don't look as adversarial or disruptive between the two as we originally thought?
Edit: Now would also be a nice time to remember how Naval was apparently, not so long ago, seen as toxic by the VC community:
> By the end of that year, Ravikant and other plaintiffs had settled the suit, but it was assumed that Ravikant had made a dangerous gamble with his reputation and connections by suing his peers.
> At the time the suit surfaced, in 2005, Ravikant was also a partner Dot Edu Ventures, which quickly removed his name from its Website, and whose founder and managing partner, Asha Jadej, played down the firm’s relationship with Ravikant. “We were at a point where we felt there were multiple factors, including the suit, which helped us all decide that this might be a good time to part ways,” Jadej told me at the time. Another person close to the situation told me at the time:“[Ravikant] had better win this suit and he better hope that he makes enough for life, because he’ll never work as a VC again.”
People resent change. But smart VCs can see the markings on the door, and AngelList is quickly becoming the main channel for early stage financing - they need to be there or miss out on getting in early.
I think it makes even more sense for VCs to use syndicates than Angels, since they have more experience managing bigger checks and angels are typically brought in for different reasons, some of which are made void in a syndicate.
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[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 16.4 ms ] threadAlso, given that AngelList has now got $24M in funding from VCs, and VCs are in turn turning angels on AngelList, things don't look as adversarial or disruptive between the two as we originally thought?
Edit: Now would also be a nice time to remember how Naval was apparently, not so long ago, seen as toxic by the VC community:
> By the end of that year, Ravikant and other plaintiffs had settled the suit, but it was assumed that Ravikant had made a dangerous gamble with his reputation and connections by suing his peers.
> At the time the suit surfaced, in 2005, Ravikant was also a partner Dot Edu Ventures, which quickly removed his name from its Website, and whose founder and managing partner, Asha Jadej, played down the firm’s relationship with Ravikant. “We were at a point where we felt there were multiple factors, including the suit, which helped us all decide that this might be a good time to part ways,” Jadej told me at the time. Another person close to the situation told me at the time:“[Ravikant] had better win this suit and he better hope that he makes enough for life, because he’ll never work as a VC again.”
I think it makes even more sense for VCs to use syndicates than Angels, since they have more experience managing bigger checks and angels are typically brought in for different reasons, some of which are made void in a syndicate.
I wrote about that yesterday, from the perspective of a startup founder, might be of interest - http://www.techfounder.net/2013/09/30/founders-perspective-o...