naval

7 ms·

1.
by naval 11y ago
Sorry spike, I wasn't trying to be rude. Never my intention. You likely caught me unawares and my animal brain responded before my human one could catch up. Be well.
2.
by naval 12y ago
There are no double fees on this fund. The 30% is used to pay the angels their carry, out of that 30%. Whatever's left goes to the GPs. Warren's criticism does not apply here. The rest is correct :-)
3.
by naval 12y ago
No management fees, angels invest their own money alongside, no 10-year lockup, enter / leave with one click, track everything online, and have 40 angels invest $25M instead of 2 VC Partners. But yes, other than that, there's noth
4.
by naval 13y ago
It's about 1/3rd of what technical recruiters charge. And again, it's only on successful hires. And if you can't afford it, you can give equity. And it's an honor system. And it's a test. And other folks in the
5.
by naval 13y ago
Not random, we've just been doing it for new companies joining the platform.
6.
by naval 13y ago
The headline is sensationalist but incorrect. There is no cost for posting - only if you land a successful hire, similar to how some others in the space work.
7.
by naval 14y ago
Yes, WSGR will do the closing for free, for any startup that they're willing to take on as a client (i.e., credible). We'll be announcing other law firms who will do the same shortly.
8.
by naval 14y ago
In most Series Seed financings, the Founders retain Board Control and can't be pushed out by just the Investors. If they're pushed out by the other founders and by the investors together, then their vesting agreement will govern what happen
9.
by naval 14y ago
I'm actually a former coder, albeit not very good.
10.
by naval 14y ago
Even complex problems can be chunked down into smaller things. That's pretty basic.
11.
by naval 14y ago
Business Development.
12.
by naval 14y ago
The problem is that there is an incentive to always pad estimates. By forcing a one-week schedule, you counterbalance that tendency, and make it possible to measure yourself more accurately. Despite this, I'd say that many of our projects f
13.
by naval 14y ago
We do regular one-day long refactoring sessions where everyone refactors. But yeah, our codebase is not a thing of beauty. We're more focused on figuring out what users actually want, and we'll rebuild it when it's falling over.
14.
by naval 14y ago
In my experience, tasks that take longer than one week sometimes take two weeks. But if they don't make it within two, they basically never ship. It's like you can go out and have one drink, or two, or many. But never three...
15.
by naval 15y ago
That's the idea. And it doesn't have to be angels / VCs only. It can also be the community of entrepreneurs. Don't worry :-)
16.
by naval 15y ago
All social proof means in this context is that there is a community of gatekeepers and scouts rather than one or two gatekeepers or scouts.
17.
by naval 15y ago
So, our fault for not having caught it the first time. But the reason is more innocuous than you might think. On a busy day, we can get 50-100 startups showing up. That's a lot of applications to read - so we run an algorithmic filter to de
18.
by naval 15y ago
Actually, we read most of the pitches that come into AngelList (there's an up-front algorithmic filter for junk). There are other investors who browse the incoming firehose as well. If we think something is interesting / likely to be a good
19.
by naval 15y ago
I don't think it'd work. Great founders are usually passionate about their business and have been thinking about the problem for a long time. It's unlikely that an "idea from the outside" would be well absorbed or by the right kind of perso
20.
by naval 16y ago
Why don't you email me instead Tremt, and I will investigate. No point in launching a public witchhunt :-) I'm at naval at angel dot co.
21.
by naval 16y ago
You're right. There will always be an offline component, and a big one. But lots of stuff, including the introductions, the social proof, the transaction, the matching, should move online. Moving it online is more aspirational and direction
22.
by naval 17y ago
This is a very nice and pithy observation - you're basically arguing that it's a classic power-law distribution: a few huge winners, and lots and lots of small players - who traditionally would have been defined as losers, had costs stayed
23.
by naval 17y ago
They can work but generally they tend to be service companies for a long time before they become product companies. However, they're almost never done by part-timers. Even 37S and FogCreek are full-time labors of love. Also, there are alway
24.
by naval 17y ago
I originally started my angel fund as an incubator (The Hit Forge). I quickly moved away because of Adverse Selection - the best entrepreneurs are insanely committed to themselves and their ideas, and rationally or irrationally, don't want
25.
by naval 19y ago
Nice - reminds me of a much better version of the old Slashdot interface - I was always going to "Threaded" and "view all on one page" Now if someone would just create a working RSS full-text feed for Paulgraham.com...
26.
by naval 19y ago
So I'm the guy behind Hit Forge. It's changed - that PR is obsolete (Thanks PG, for helping with the strategy shift). We're a straight early stage seed-investment fund. We invest in social-media early-stage web startups, putting in between