An API is still an application programming interface right? What kind of distributon / business development are we talking about here? And how can it possibly be conducted through an API?
You don't have to wine and dine Facebook's business development team to get the user actions in your app syndicated on Facebook, you just use their API to do it yourself.
The problem is that there is an incentive to always pad estimates. By forcing a one-week schedule, you counterbalance that tendency, and make it possible to measure yourself more accurately. Despite this, I'd say that many of our projects fail, never ship, ship and have to be rolled back, or ship and have to be iterated 5 or more times until we get them "good enough." But it still beats taking 3 months to ship something interesting, which is the cycle most startups are on once they're out of an incubator or done with their initial release.
We do regular one-day long refactoring sessions where everyone refactors. But yeah, our codebase is not a thing of beauty. We're more focused on figuring out what users actually want, and we'll rebuild it when it's falling over.
In my experience, tasks that take longer than one week sometimes take two weeks. But if they don't make it within two, they basically never ship. It's like you can go out and have one drink, or two, or many. But never three...
That's such a great way to put it. You hit the nail on the head. For the rare exceptions to this, you better be damn sure it's worth the time, and that you really need it. Because if you think about it some more, you will probably discover you're better off not doing it at all.
I've had a few tasks like this that we just ended up scrapping, even after several weeks of work, because we found we didn't need the monstrosity of a feature as much as we thought we did.
I understand the direction you're going in, and in order to scale, it's inevitable. I don't begrudge you that.
But my understanding is that in the past, you guys made something of an implicit guarantee that you would look at all submissions and be the point of introduction for great companies who don't yet already have an introduction. The necessary shift you are now making will eliminate this opening.
You mention that there is a community of gatekeepers and scouts, but I really don't see it this way. One cannot, by policy, contact anyone on the site without already having a "follower" relationship with them.
It would be nice to see a handful of angels/vcs take upon this mantle of being the go-to talent scout for great but unconnected businesses. There's no reason these people couldn't use AngelList as the platform on which to do it, of course.
So, our fault for not having caught it the first time. But the reason is more innocuous than you might think. On a busy day, we can get 50-100 startups showing up. That's a lot of applications to read - so we run an algorithmic filter to decide what to even look at. My guess is that your initial pitch didn't make it past the filter. The second time did, but not because you had a ton of offline traction with press and investors, but because you had a referrer who's known to the community - Joshua Baer. Yes, that's a bit of social proof (knowing an entrepreneur who's respected in the community) but not a particularly high bar. We'll try and do better in the future, and meantime, congratulations!
For the record, I have looked at our first application again and I can see how it left something to be desired. I do think AL is working great for us now and I think hustle can create enough social proof to make things happen. The bar isn't too high, even though it is a barrier. Geography is huge, probably too much. But a few flights can overcome that sometimes.
Actually, we read most of the pitches that come into AngelList (there's an up-front algorithmic filter for junk). There are other investors who browse the incoming firehose as well. If we think something is interesting / likely to be a good match, we email it to investors who follow those markets and locations. If the company gets interest, we broaden the send. Investors follow / take intros as they're interested. Keep in mind that 95%+ of businesses are not fundable by early-stage tech-focused Angels. AngelList is not a circular-reasoning walled garden. Most of the value that we bring investors is surfacing them deals outside of their social networks, and most of the value that we bring startups is finding them investors outside of their social networks. If we didn't do that, we would fail.
It's very much like a dating site. We can't let all of the guys contact all of the girls whenever and however they want. But matches are made all the same.
I don't think it'd work. Great founders are usually passionate about their business and have been thinking about the problem for a long time. It's unlikely that an "idea from the outside" would be well absorbed or by the right kind of person. Ideas are a dime a dozen anyway. It's all execution.
You're right. There will always be an offline component, and a big one. But lots of stuff, including the introductions, the social proof, the transaction, the matching, should move online. Moving it online is more aspirational and directional than absolute.
