Exchangel – Fantasy Angel Investing
exchangel.co
exchangel.co
Deleted comment
Not that those are necessarily exclusive - he could be nodding his head, thinking "I get it, this guy is crazy"
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-03/05/naveen-jain-t...
My link if anyone wants (if you use, we both get Ex$50k apparently): http://exchangel.co/r/38
Gotta start somewhere... it's like the 2015 draft class for now!
how do you track returns? how much money the companies raise? what the companies are valued at? isn't this dangerous because all angel investors including ron conway and pg say it's not about how much money you raise and that is a poor indicator of how successful your start-up is going to be...
obviously a fantasy league where you have to wait 10 years to see who actually wins and becomes a 10 billion company etc. isn't that much fun, but i can't figure out what short-term metrics that would work across different start-ups with different growth plans (i.e. some start-ups will focus on page views, others on sign-ups, others on transactions etc.)
this could indirectly be a good way to reveal peoples biases (including angels) about what companies will be successful... it's especially interesting as it removes from the equation the one component that vcs/investors say is most important which is their feeling about how good the team is... if the stock exchange can accurately predict which companies are going to be successful without that information that has interesting implications for vcs approach in picking companies.
incl. obvious implications for ycombinators model with 10 minute interviews etc.
(Here's a paper Dave McClure wrote about prediction markets, if you're not familiar: http://500hats.typepad.com/files/ChannellingCrowds_DaveMcClu...)
With a few months of back data at Sand Hill Exchange, we've found our results often shockingly accurate.
For example, even before we experimented with a profit incentive, our users forecast big increases in valuations on Slack (http://blog.sandhill.exchange/post/101804376238/sand-hill-ex... ), Beepi, Mattermark, and Reddit, all of which proved true.
Our community also outperformed journalists: http://blog.sandhill.exchange/post/101679447223/parsing-the-...
I won't tell you what the smart money has been betting on in the past few months, but it will be great to see how this pans out. Here's the January predictions of relevance: http://blog.sandhill.exchange/post/109527449373/january-2015...
I was thinking an initial investment account could be setup for Every baby born where the government would put in say ten thousand into an account for eighteen years and The new adult would then return $10k from the account at that point and would have that money as a foundation for entering society.
This has also been proposed as a way to get out of the Social Security "mess" that is heading our way.
Not saying it couldn't be done, but haven't seen the idea ever get much traction.
It would be great to be able to take some type of index for each birth year in the past and apply a 10k investment into it and see what you arrive at.
My chrome extensions are probably fudging it.
Also it would be great to see some more information for each company added to the listings, even some basic details pulled from Crunchbase would be nifty.
Personally for me I would've liked to see the start-ups that did not get through interviews for YC etc.
Nothing against having the ones who made it through YC etc. too, but these have already been vetted by people we admire/trust/know-of.
Having just these makes it seem like picking out of the Dow/S&P/Your advisers suggestions as opposed to ALL public companies (penny stock, pink slip and the rest included).
Deleted comment
If most people on a fantasy site seem to be making money hand over fist then it's time to watch out. Angel investing is harder than most people think.
I also don't like the "get an extra 50k" link (viral I suppose). Hope people won't start posting their links in here :D
In sports you have the probability of a lower tier athlete going off on any given day and that probability is high enough to create uncertainty, For this model to actually work you need a VC like "HighlineVC" to hit a unicorn. Fat chance of that every happening, they are orders of magnitude more stupid then sequioa.
As mentioned below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9272670 ), we're excited to see many more players expanding the fantasy VC space -- startups are awesome and we need more utilities like this!
-- Gerrit Hall Co-Founder, Sand Hill Exchange gerrit AT sandhill DOT exchange
Obviously, there are many key differences -- Sand Hill Exchange in particular offers the ability short sell, profit, etc. We'll be spinning up a hacker news league on http://sandhill.exchange/ soon so you can all skip our waitlist!
-- Gerrit Hall Co-Founder, Sand Hill Exchange gerrit AT sandhill DOT exchange
i left the world of finance and headed toward software engineering. side benefit, no fantasy football. nobody pretending that they understood "the market". those who commented regarding "shorts" etc. why not options? or swaptions? or futures? or future options? you should totally start a risk-neutral team. wait, weren't we talking about software engineering.
here is the thing. by and large, you all have zero clue what you're talking about. tell me that's not true all day long, but, whatever. you've read a book. you've worked on some algorithm. but chances are you've never been wined and dined by a bulge bracket investment bank attempting to win the brokerage business of the hedge fund you work at. you've likely never spoken with bankers about upcoming offerings. you've likely never been given a tour of the manufacturing plant floor by management, because you're thinking of investing a hundred or so million.
and here is the thing that makes me really sad. at least bankers, a horrible bunch of humans, by and large studied the humanities and admit that they are generally selling crap. this new breed of programmers sorta study computer science and then walk around like they have "the answer" for every human problem. and now i have to deal with "Fantasy Angel Investing".
run for the exits
the exit is to your left, don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Note: I'm assuming that your use of the word "bankers" refers broadly to those who work in finance (investment bankers, fund managers, etc.).
also, i didn't say they weren't likable. generally they are very likable. and i didn't say they don't know what they are doing. they know very well what they're doing.
Not a banker. Got it. Hey, did you end up investing that 100 million in that factory?
It's a prediction market for hackers to guess which companies built by other hackers are going to make it big. I'd say we're perfectly qualified.