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"It  has been well documented that the venture and angel communities are  going through some profound changes right now. \u00A0As the costs to launch a  company have come down, the check sizes needed to fund those companies  have also come down.\r\n\r\nThis increased demand for seed funding has given birth to a new crop of seed funds (sometimes called \u201CSuper Angels\u201D) and incubators that  have been optimized to cut smaller checks, with an eye towards smaller  exits.\r\n\r\nNot  willing to cede the ground floor of investments many traditional VC  funds have launched seed programs of their own, able to cut checks as  small as $50K - something that would have been unheard of for a large  fund a few years ago.\r\n\r\nBut even as super angels and VCs jostle for the plum seed deals, there is another force emerging on the funding landscape.\r\nIt\u2019s  not a fund, nor is it a financial services consultancy. \u00A0At it\u2019s most  ambitious, it\u2019s an attempt to democratize the funding process.\r\n\r\nIt\u2019s called AngelList.\r\n\r\nIn  April of 2007, a serial entrepreneur named Naval Ravikant and a VC /  EIR named Babak Nivi got together to start blogging about everything an  entrepreneur needed to know about raising funding. \u00A0They called the blog  Venture Hacks, and in it they covered topics like how to negotiate a term sheet, terms that can be problematic for entrepreneurs, and the pros and cons of convertible debt.\r\n\r\nIf you are an entrepreneur who has researched term sheets before, you\u2019ve probably come across their stuff (along with Brad Feld\u2019s blog, and more recently, Fred Wilson\u2019s MBA Mondays.)\r\n\r\nIn  some ways, AngelList is the productization of this resource, and is an  ambitious effort to help entrepreneurs get funded, and on the buy side,  to help investors find deals.\r\n\r\nHere\u2019s how it works.\r\n\r\nAngelList  is a curated email distribution list of angel and seed stage investors.  \u00A0Nivi and Naval screen the companies / deals that get pushed out to  this list, and they screen the investors for inclusion on the receiving  end.\r\n\r\nThe result is quality on both ends, and a nearly frictionless seed funding marketplace.\r\n\r\nDeal  summaries get distributed once or twice a week, and there is no  pressure for investors to respond. \u00A0If an investor is interested, they  respond to the deal, and AngelList coordinates an intro.\r\n\r\nFrom  an entrepreneurial perspective, AngelList is an extremely efficient way  to get on the radar of hundreds of top investors, in one fell swoop.  \u00A0Entrepreners can also view investor profiles and funding histories that  shows them who actually writes checks.\r\n\r\nAccording  to Naval, AngelList is now nearly 400 investors strong, has funded 50  companies, and has looked at over 1000 deals. \u00A0You can read some testimonials on Quora.\r\n\r\nThere is no doubt that the new crop of super angels / seed funds is having a bit of a disruptive effect on the start-up scene.\r\n\r\nBut  if you ask me, the real disruption is coming in the form of an old  fashioned email list called AngelList that seems to be inserting itself right  smack in the middle between the entrepreneur and investor communities."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/insider/2010/10/04/the-quiet-rise-of-angellist/www.linkedin.com/in/yochananberkowitz/>