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Good advice for startups.

AngelList ScoutsAugust 31

AngelList Scouts find high-quality startups for the angels on AngelList. When a Scout tells us to look at a startup, we pay attention.

Update: Liz Gannes covers this story for GigaOM.

We look at every startup that applies to AngelList — whether or not they have social proof — but a little social proof makes it easier for us to say yes. And the social proof of a Scout is especially interesting to us.

Why? Because the average Joe usually doesn’t get anything when he makes intros for a startup. He might get some advisory shares but that’s rarer thank you think.

The Scouts program is different. First, the Scouts are getting AngelList profiles with badges that display how many high-quality startups they’ve referred to the community. With the startups’ permission, we’ll list the names of the startups too. And most important: the Scouts will be able to send startups directly to AngelList, under their own names, without us in the middle.

Who are the Scouts? Each of these Scouts has sent us one high-quality startup that was good enough for AngelList. And most have sent more.

Los Angeles:

How we’re recruiting a product designer for AngelListAugust 25

We’re recruiting a product designer for AngelList. Here’s how we’re doing it and what we’re learning. (If you’re interested in working with us, details are at the bottom of this post.)

I didn’t start by putting up a job post. I figured if everybody else is doing it, I need to take a different approach. So I called the smartest designers and entrepreneurs I knew and asked them for advice. Here’s what I’ve learned:

• We want a product designer. This job post from Quora defines a product designer as “Extraordinary product, interaction, and visual design talent [with] a curiosity and passion for crafting amazing experiences.” Product design encompasses visual design, interaction design, branding… it’s the whole user experience.
• A small team like ours should hire designers who can build what they design. At a minimum, that means building HTML, CSS, perhaps JS, perhaps beyond. See these posts by Jason Putorti and Rebekah Cox for more info. Also read Rebekah’s Early Quora Design Notes.
• Quora has the best job posti

Xconomy covers AngelListAugust 20

This Xconomy article by Wade Roush does a great job of telling the AngelList and Venture Hacks story:

In Seed Funding Race, AngelList Sorts the “Junk” from the “Maybes”

I hesitated to link to it because these articles always make you look more handsome than you really are. But Wade does a great job of rounding up the state of the art of angel investing and placing AngelList in that context. Here’s a choice quote:

“I think the way to get into angel investing is, first, you obviously have to have money; you have to have a brand, otherwise you are not going to be differentiated and you are not going to see good deals; and you have to have a network of angels to work with, so you can move in packs and find other people to help you with due diligence,” Ravikant says.

It’s only then that AngelList can help. “The final thing is that you need to have good deal flow, so that you can see when the good things come along,” Ravikant says. “We will bring you deal flow, make it easy to syndicate deals, and we’ll show you deals that hopefully over time matches up to your interests.”

Check out the

Quora MarketingAugust 19

Quora is a Q&A site. We were planning on posting a question asking startups and angels to share their AngelList experience. But someone beat us to it:

What do people think of AngelList?

I can’t think of a better piece of marketing than this thread. There’s nothing we could say better. I want to replace the AngelList homepage with this thread.

Quora spam

Quora’s goal is “to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question.”

The Quora community will kill you if you fill it with rubbish. You have to have a lot of very happy users to try Quora marketing. And you have to expect negative reviews too. Quora’s looking for the best answer — not your answer.

Hating Quora

I’ve resisted Quora since they were in closed beta. Partly because everyone was raving about it. Partly because I thought the user experience was insane.

Now I’m hooked. And I think they’ve created a new class of user experience.  It’s a “go with the flow” experience. Don’t try to load a model of the site in your h

7 angel investing tips in 7 minutesAugust 3

Last week, Naval and a slew of angels shared their investing advice with an audience of angels-in-training at AngelConf 2010. Here’s the video (each talk is 7 minutes long):

Video: 7-Minute Abs