The valley’s angel scene is going crazy
It’s unrecognisable from just a few years ago: lots more angels, much bigger sums, many more investments
This video covers a lot of ground very fast. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself itching to get more detailed answers to plenty of new questions at the end.
Keith Rabois is VP of Strategy & Business Development for Slide, where he is responsible for Slide’s corporate strategy and partnerships.
During his tenure, Slide has become the world’s leading social entertainment company, offering millions of people worldwide a fun way to communicate and engage on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.
Prior to Slide, Keith served as Vice President of Business & Corporate Development at LinkedIn.
Earlier in his career, Keith served as Executive VP of Business Development and Policy for PayPal, and is said to be the only person who owns equity in every VC-financed consumer Internet company founded by former PayPal employees.
He currently serves on the board of directors of Yelp, Xoom, Vendio, and FanIQ.
He was an early investor in YouTube and LinkedIn, and is a limited partner at Sequoia Capital. Keith also practiced at prestigious law firm Sullivan & Cromwell.
It certainly looks as if things are going crazy in the Valley. I came across this recent report that Slide has now been acquired by Google:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/google-and-slide-building-more-social.html
They say “As the Slide team joins Google, we’ll be investing even more to make Google services socially aware and expand these capabilities for our users across the web.”
This makes me wonder just how socially aware Google will actually become – I’ll need to have a good luck round to see if I can find out any more about this.
Debbie;
Please tell me what you think of that! Keith says that angels invest more than 500 K per startup! I think that even if somebody has this sum of money, he won’t invest them in a project unless he has like 10 times that sum of money, for example if an angle invests 500 K, this means his bank account must be more than 5 Millions!
Bassem, there’s a good definition of angel investors on Wikipedia. Here it is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_investor
It says here that ”in addition to funds, angel investors can often provide valuable management advice and important contacts” – this sort of advice and the contacts would be really hard for a startup company to find for themselves.
I don’t really buy what this man says, the financial crisis forced many investors to be very careful about new investments, startups hardly can find any funds these days!
On second thoughts, I guess that Internet startups are having good investment opportunity, Social media is really expanding, 5 years ago Facebook was only a new idea, look what Fcebook is now!
Bassem – as far as Facebook is concerned, Gigaom has a good article about the battle between Facebook and Google:
http://gigaom.com/2010/08/06/how-slide-pushes-googles-open-social-strategy/
It says that Facebook “has succeeded by encouraging its users and developers to make the site interesting through contributing their own creations, like baby pictures and mafia games.”
Personally, I tend not to play the games when I’m on Facebook but I do see that an awful lot of my contacts are spending a lot of time on Farmville, MafiaWars, etc.
It makes me wonder how people actually have the time to do that! I find it hard to have enough time to actually reply to messages a lot of the time.
I find that the stuff that I like on Facebook are stuff like the TechCrunch page reports and TEDtalks.
Hey Debbie;
You know? I just found that stats on the Internet, showing that angel investment has been fluctuating during the financial crisis, take a look that the stat http://gigaom.com/2010/04/27/frothy-times-for-web-angel-investing/
I found an article talking about angel investment, that was before the financial crisis, http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2008/04/angel-investors.html
It’s easy to see that angel investors take a good take of services, for example Software accounted for the largest share of Angel investments, with 27%, followed by Healthcare Services/Medical Devices and Equipment (19%) and Biotech (12%)