All Things Angel Investing #11

Intangible Angel Weekly: Discussing Peak YC & Crossover Funds

I was talking to someone this week about the difficulties in scaling community-driven businesses. Often group quality suffers with added participant quantity (though not this community!). One recent tweet that caught my eye is a YC alum stating Y Combinator has lost its soul due to rapid expansion (see below). It will be interesting to see how YC adapts in the future and how a new wave of community-centric businesses scale without losing their magic.

Peter Weyland @AdamNeumannsCoS

Y Combinator has lost its soul: A YC founder's perspective... The batches and checks are too big and the team is too small making it marginally useful unless youre a b2b saas or dev tool company, and it's filled with tech climbers.

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Being Talked About:

• Congrats to Michael L. on getting out to SF! (Slack)

• CPG investment talk (Slack)

• Mario Gabriele profiles Schlaf in The Generalist

• Requests: 1/ people knowledgeable about alternative proteins 2/ UX experts and 3/ eCommerce data science (see #Help-Asks)

  If you'd like to featured as an active angel in NYC for an upcoming VC fund project, submit your name (Slack)

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Check It Out:

• Read: How to build an informational edge as an investor (Sapphire Ventures)

• Interact: Our friends at Enhance launched a global map of startup studios

• Read: VisibleVC on what investors expect to see in data rooms

• Watch: @briannekimmel @tylertringas and @sunilpai on vc fund operations

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Trends:

Gokul Rajaram on a new trend of "crossover funds" (funds that invest across both private and public companies) moving downmarket and leading large series Series A rounds (while often not not taking a board seat):

Gokul Rajaram @gokulr

1. The new Series A disruption aka The Revenge of the Crossover funds (thread)

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Investing Acumen:

Great thread started by Jeff Richard of GGV: "Explain your public investing thesis in a tweet"

Jeff Richards @jrichlive

Explain your public investing thesis in a tweet. Here’s mine: Cloud/SaaS has driven >$3 trillion of market value in last 10 yrs. Next 10 years will be > last 10 yrs. Take advantage of market dislocation to accumulate more when favorite names drop. Be open to new thinking. Hold.

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Deals:

• ERA's summer participants, a memo composer, automated sales outreach to targeted buyers, Launch Accelerator Cohort 18, human movement digitization for athletes (see #pitches)

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Parting Thought:

Turner Novak @TurnerNovak

@jrichlive Invest in platforms that other investors don't realize are platforms yet

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