AngelList's Form Origins

A story about how AngelList started from a simple form collecting investor preferences, as told by Nivi (co-founder) on Air Chat.

"We had Venture Hacks, the blog, and I was trying to figure out how to turn it into a business. I emailed Naval, who owned 10% of it, about selling a PDF with templates. Naval was cool with it and told me to keep his 10% stake.

Then we were driving home from an event, and Naval had this idea: 'What I really want is a list of investors and just what they invest in, what check size.' People were always asking us through Venture Hacks for investor introductions. We wanted a reference list to make proper intros.

I went home that night and made a form. I emailed it to every investor I knew asking: what do you invest in, what's your average check size, what's your email address, are you open to people contacting you about deals? They immediately filled it in. It was the ugliest form - I didn't even pay for the premium version.

We put it on our website, got some press coverage because it was 'here's a list of all the angels.' We had to remove their emails because people were spamming them. That became the precursor to what AngelList is now - a multi-billion dollar company. It all started from just this simple list of angel investors."