Angel Investing Platforms

I started doing everything virtually out of necessity because there was no activity going on in Florida and definitely not in my part of Florida. And so I had to figure out how to do things virtually. And so Angel List was instrumental in me being able to get started. But I think these, Angelist is the one that I use the most often. In the past I've looked at other, some other platforms. There are a number of them out there and many that are emerging. So you've got things like Seed Invest and well, Republic I guess actually is an affiliate of Angellist. But you've got these, these platforms cropping up and what's powerful about them is it's building on some themes that are now, you know, they were early on some themes that we now all accept, which is being able to do things virtually, being able to do things in a distributed global way. They already had the infrastructure set up to do that. So, you know, case in point, something, something like my syndicate, in a, in a normal context there's no way we could have met but for Angelist and you know, someone like me who, you know, I scaled my syndicate from literally 0 to now is about 2200 LPs in 13 months. That would not be possible manually and it would not be possible but for a platform like that. And those platforms, like I said, those platforms are powerful because they have global reach and it's expanding. And then also in particular a platform like Angelus because it's also a marketplace, right, in a discovery tool. So yes, they're doing the mechanics and some of the back office stuff behind investing, but it's also allowing folks like me to build, it's a following if you were in a quasi public way. And it's allowing investors to discover people like me who are putting together deals, but it's also allowing people like me who are putting together deals to discover investors. And so like I said, I don't think there's any faster way to scale it than these platforms. And then when I look at my LP base, I mean I have folks from literally all over the world, all time zones, all, all professions and you know, from folks who are just, you know, they have, you know, they're doctors, lawyers, engineers and they're doing some angel investings, to partners at venture funds, to CEOs, CFOs, professors like yourself. And I think these platforms are so huge and in some ways are really just in the first innings because I think about, you know, when I first joined Angellist, you know, three, three years ago, even though I backed a ton of syndicates, there really only a handful that were really active and there wasn't a lot of noise kind of on the platform. Now I like it. There's a. And you've probably seen it yourself, there's this massive proliferation of new syndicates, new investors. The deal flow has increased exponentially. And I think it's also had a positive impact on the quality of the deals. Because one thing that everyone has to be careful about as an angel is kind of figuring out this issue kind of around adverse selection. Right. So you only see what you see, whether that's in your close network or a platform like AngelList. And so if that is the only pool that you're investing from, you have to have some examination of are these actually good opportunities in and of themselves or am I kind of investing in a vacuum? So when platforms like AngelList continue to expand, continue to kind of open up the tent, get diverse fund managers, or whatever you want to call them, syndicate leads, get diverse investors, that drives better deals to the platform and I think that starts to help that particular problem.