Seed Capital From Angel Investors: AngelList Founder Naval Ravikant (Part 5)

Naval Ravikant: There are a quite a few companies that still exist organically on the side, and we are trying to push more toward that. We want the entire system to be organic; I don’t want people emailing me and saying, Hey, would you email me out? That is not what we are trying to do here. We are trying to create an open, social community.

Craigslist is a very good analogy for what we want to do. The way Craigslist started was that people were moving into the area in 1995–1996; this was in San Francisco. And they needed a place to live, so they would say, Hey, I hear this Craig knows where you can find some roommates.

Sramana Mitra: Rooms in apartments.

NR: Right. You would email Craig, and he would say, Yeah, I know so-and-so was looking for a roommate. Craig was matching you up manually. That is how he started, and then Craig said, I am just going to send an email to all the people looking for roommates, all the other roommates. So, he sent an email once a day, and everyone was on it. After that he said OK, one email probably isn’t enough. Let’s break it up instead into a set of a bunch of different emails. And then he put up a site and said, Don’t email me; connect on the site.

We are kind of moving down the same path.

SM: Interesting. I would actually like a system to recommend the screened One Million by One Million deals, but I guess I need some way to endorse my companies, so you have to help me get set up …

NR: So if you are an accredited investor …

SM: No I don’t want to invest; I want to recommend the One Million by One Million companies that are already screened and ready for investment. I want to be able to endorse them so that they get visibility on the homepage. So, if you see something from me, it would probably be a flag that this deal is worth looking at. Similarly, in an organic system, a One Million by One Million endorsed deal would mean a highly qualified investment opportunity, not random stuff.

NR: So, right now they are just going to put you down as a referral, and you will confirm that you are indeed endorsing the deal. That would establish and brand the deal as a One Million by One Million deal. And you would also email me, which I know is not a great longer-term solution. The longer-term solution would need to be more organic. There are Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulations that we need to work through as we spec this all out. We would like the site to be increasingly public.

SM: I have a question about the SEC issue, actually.

NR: The companies also want to protect their privacy, so it is up to the company if they want to be more publicly visible to noninvestors and what information they want to show, but we have all that in development right now.

SM: Well, I really don’t want to see anything, it is more like …

NR: It is the endorsement. You need a process to make an authentic and validated endorsement without room for games.

SM: I want you and others to see that these deals are referrals from One Million by One Million … and that means something special.

NR: But for you to be able to endorse a company, you have to have visibility on the company, and for you to have visibility on the company when you are not an investor, it requires a separate set of permissions and code. We are building that now.

SM: OK, so I think at some point I would like to provide some sort of bridge between us because we have had 5,000 people participate in our free roundtable program already, and I have personally coached more than 300 of them. This is a natural partnership.

NR: Wow! I will give you a simple example: Here is a company that has a laundry list of investors. It also has advisors, and these advisors are people who aren’t investors, they don’t necessarily have access to the site to see other investments, but the company can add an advisor. They send out an email. You confirm, and you can leave a note when you respond, so it is the same kind of thing.

SM: That would be fine, that would work fine. And we could integrate wtih that process quite nicely.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Seed Capital From Angel Investors: AngelList Founder Naval Ravikant
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