Project Pegasus: Get intro’d to a vetted pool of angel investors. | Product Hunt

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Launch tags:

Launch Team

Atmos Financial

Maker

Hi everyone! Welcome to our experiment! Can, Dorena and I are 3 early stage founders ourelves, and we believe that founder talent is uniformly distributed – having a network is not indicative of founder success. The current market for pre-seed investing has super high information asymmetries and is an inefficient market. Accessing pre-seed capital through a network favors the status quo, which is a huge disadvantage for people of color, females and people that don’t have an ivy league school on their CV. We know from our own experience that raising a pre-seed is a huge pain and every founder you’ll talk to will tell you the same – while raising an angel round for our current startup, we just couldn’t take it anymore and had to do something about it, so we're piloting project pegasus as an experiment. If it's successful and we can make some matches between founders and angels, we'll build this out as a platform. If not, that's fine too and it was worth a try! If we can make matches, we'll take a small commission from the angel investors – but for founders the service is free! Thoughts? Ideas on how we could improve? Let us know in the comments below!

7yr ago

Froggodoggo

Maker

@niko_dunk Rock and roll!

7yr ago

William Dünkler

@niko_dunk JFDI

7yr ago

Froggodoggo

Maker

@niko_dunk YAAAAY!!! Let's do it :)

7yr ago

Hustle Crew Academy

@niko_dunk Interesting concept! How do you find the angels you pass the applications onto? This feels a lot like the VC scout model applied to angel investors.

7yr ago

Froggodoggo

Maker

@niko_dunk @abadesi Thanks! Niko's currently in SF and sleeping so I'll respond :-) In the beginning we'll see if any of the applications is a fit for angels that we already know. If we think so, we'll do a double opt-in intro. If we can make successful intros, hopefully more angels and startups will want to work with us. Let's see if that plan works out :-) What do you mean by VC scout model?

7yr ago

Interesting concept; I too find this to be an application of the scout/headhunter model to the angel round as another user pointed out.

7yr ago

Froggodoggo

Maker

@mike_at_indivius By scout model, do you mean what they mean in this article? https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/2... If yes, I would say what we are trying to achieve is different. Because students and founders (that work as scouts) reinforce the status quo (because they are probably also male, white and went to an Ivy League school). As a founder, if I already have a network of good founders, it's not that hard to get an intro to an angel. Or if you go to Stanford, odds are that you or your parents know enough wealthy people. Does that make sense?

7yr ago

@canolcer Not quite what I meant. Job headhunter is the easiest parallel for me to draw. You take a commission in exchange for a completed/successful pairing. I think it's reasonable depending on your fee (would love to see some numbers or examples posted) Additionally, some understanding of what arenas your angels specialize in would be some helpful additions to your website. I'll be following this for certain.

7yr ago

Froggodoggo

Maker

@mike_at_indivius Got it. Hmm never heard of VC scouts before, but makes sense that they exist. Not sure how they operate. Do they also have platforms where any startup can apply? We're on purpose not specifying any arenas/industries for the time being. Everyone is welcome :-)

7yr ago

Atmos Financial

Maker

@canolcer @mike_at_indivius Great point. Datapoints will be added soon. I agree that we're a version of the scouting model: a scout takes up a startup case, and searches for investment for them, keeping 7-8%. Copy pasted from another of my answers above however there's a big difference: VC scouts accept any case, and match it with any kind of money. We only intro the very best cases that apply to legitimate angels that we personally know. Why? Because since we have enough applications we can intro only the very best early-stage startups to the very best angels in our book and still profit WHILE upholding our reputation. Hope that makes sense!

7yr ago

@canolcer @mike_at_indivius @niko_dunk -- I agree that we're a version of the scounting model: a scout takes up a startup case, and searches for investment for them, keeping 7-8%. illegal in states, so you know

7yr ago

On average 3-5% startups get their seed. I would be interested to see how that number changes with Pegasus

7yr ago

Atmos Financial

Maker

@ipstas Agreed! I doubt whether projects like this can change that percentage much, but hopefully more high-quality startups will get funded!

7yr ago

@niko_dunk Well... and who decides that startup is a high-quality? Why startup would leave information at all? How many angels you have already (nothing on your LP)? How do you vet them? How do you vet startups? What is your expertise? To vet a startup in _any_ niche you need a LOT of expertise. Same for an angel. I can keep asking, because your LP creates more questions than answers

7yr ago

Atmos Financial

Maker

@ipstas Hi Stan! Good questions! I can only say right now that this is an _experiment_, we don't have all the answers either, and we'll see how many intros and matches we can make by the end of this week. But I think this problem requires a solution, and we're taking a crack at solving this inefficiency.

7yr ago

@niko_dunk Food for thought: Sometimes inefficiency exists just because the market participant (in this case an angel investor) wants it to exist.

7yr ago

Froggodoggo

Maker

@niko_dunk @ipstas True. But we think they shouldn't exist :-)

7yr ago