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The Coming Angel Ice Age

In a provocative post last fall, Caterina Fake called out the coming Age of the Cockroach. A period in which only the toughest, meanest unicorn startups would survive as funding oxygen at the highest high altitudes of start up land got more scarce. Now, based on a my own experience and an admittedly unrepresentative survey of angel investors,  I am increasingly worried about a coming Angel Ice Age: extending Caterina’s thesis in terms of a pulling back beyond late stage Venture Capital tourists and others right to the entry level of the capital formation process. Namely angel investors. What makes me (and my sample group) think that? 1. Excess tech startup supply relative to investor bandwidth: The movement to the gig economy (and hence growth in entrepreneurship in many forms), the explosion of accelerators (both horizontal and vertical) and the fact that startups are so cool on campus (hence a massive expansion of entrepreneurship classes and no school feeling complete without its own incubator, accelerator etc) has generated an exploding tech startup volume but with, in my view, questionable quality. I am not alone as an early stage investor in finding it harder and harder to sift through so many opportunities. I, and I am finding many other angels investors, are simply over whelmed by deal volume and “velocity”. (Personally one of my NY resolutions is to stop going to big accelerator program Demo Days. I increasingly find them to be way over rehearsed and a poor use of my time.) 2. More angels, but investment activity per capita seems lower:  Read Complete Article