There is an opportunity for a new VC Firm to brand itself. Recent brands in Venture Capital arose from transparency and founder-friendliness. YCombinator gives new, young, technical talent an entry into Silicon Valley. 500 Startups does it globally. Fred Wilson blogs the business. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz back Founders to be Public Company CEOs. More

People often mock Super-Angels as being impure because they invest other people’s money. We also often get asked “What are VCs and Seed Funds doing on AngelList?” (They’re clearly marked, by the way, and you can choose who your pitch is visible to.) I will propose, however, that whose money you’re investing is less relevant than on what terms it comes on. More

I co-founded AngelList because I was tired of saying no to entrepreneurs. I wanted to say instead, “yes, we can help you get funded.” So, it’s especially disappointing when we get promising startups pitching on AngelList from remote locations. Some we’ve managed to get funded – including ones in Canada and Europe. More

All sorts of businesses are being built by violating assumptions about the privacy of data. Flickr violated the assumption that you wanted your photos private by default. Before Flickr came along, the default photo sharing model, espoused by Shutterfly, Snapfish etc., was that of private photo sharing. LinkedIn violates the assumption that your resumé is private. More

A lot of entrepreneurs assume that the initial way to engage with an investor is to *insist* on a meeting. It’s a relatively safe assumption that anyone on the buy side (an investor, an advertiser, an executive at a large company) receives far more requests for meetings than they can follow up on, and are constantly looking for excuses to say “no.” Synchronous activities, such as phone calls, screencasts, videos, and webex conferences are almost as bad. More

I have a new post on picking a co-founder, up here: http://venturehacks.com/articles/pick-cofounder More

I know I haven’t posted recently, but I have been busy! Nivi and I are launching a new site called Venture Hacks, an entrepreneur’s guide to hacking Venture Capital. It’s a “tell all” site that helps entrepreneurs get on an even footing with their better-informed counterparts when negotiating an investment. More

The Google / YouTube looks like a win-win all around. Well, almost. Acquire the future of video on the Internet for roughly 1% of your market cap. Get $500M in escrow to protect against copyright lawsuits These are lawsuits that Google would probably have to defend YouTube against anyway, even if Google didn’t own YouTube. More

Barry Diller wants Ask.com to grow market share. I’m sure there’s lots to be done on improving distribution deals, the crawler, back-end algorithms, etc., but how about starting with some simple, obvious UI fixes? Here are the results of a search for “Search Engine” on the 4 majors: At 1024×768, the UI differences are glaring. More