Apparently, early stage investors aren’t endangered
This post originally ran on Philly VC Deal Lawyer a blog about Philly startups by Christopher McDemus. It is re-purposed here with permission, as part of a partnership.
You may recall my earlier post from a few weeks ago entitled “Are True Early Stage Investors An Endangered Species?“ After laying down some background, I took the position that super-angel funds and incubators/accelerators (e.g., Y Combinator, TechStars, DreamIt), had the best chance of solving the early stage funding gap and that capital efficiencies and bootstrapping might help temporarily fill in some of the other holes. Since I wrote that post, there’s been a lot of online traffic surrounding this issue.
Much of it was ignited by conversations emanating out of Y Combinator’s AngelConf on July 29th. All of the new super-angel funds popping up in the past few weeks just add to the fervor. Just today, the WSJ put out a piece noting that Aydin Senkut (former Googler) is closing a $40M super-angel fund, which follows Ron Conway’s $20M super-angel fund, Chris Sacca’s (former Googler) $8.5M super-angel fund, Dave McClure’s (former PayPal’r) $30M super-angel fund and Mike Maples’ new $73.5M super-angel fund.
Here are some of the articles that popped up since my last piece:
