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Exchangel – Fantasy Angel Investing
- jschwartz11 12y agoWould be cool to add in other startup stats at some point! Could potentially use http://mattermark.com/ http://mattermark.com/.
- zhoujianfu 12y agodefinitely will! ALL of them eventually? :) Gotta start somewhere... it's like the 2015 draft class for now!
- nicholasdrake 12y agothis is a really cool idea.. its also great intel on the yc batch companies haha! 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.)
- zhoujianfu 12y agoThe idea is that after the "seed" stage we're in now, the shares will float, so you can put in bids and asks to buy and sell. But, whenever real-world liquidity news comes in (raise money, acquisition, ipo), people will be able to buy/sell at that price for a week before it goes back to floating!
- nicholasdrake 12y agoahhh so it's less fantasy football more stock exchange where value is determined collectively by the market, as opposed to externally e.g. with fantasy scores every week. i understand now. 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.
- nicholasdrake 12y agoit would be interesting to have two separate fantasy leagues. one just like this one . but another where investors get to see 2 minute videos with the founders just talking about themselves/their company... it would be itneresting to see if the companies they invest in are any different because of these videos... and furthermore if 2 minutes of video lead to significanlty better predictions about which companies will be successful.. incl. obvious implications for ycombinators model with 10 minute interviews etc.
- ics 12y agoFantasy stock markets were fun back in school, this could be too. Edit with my only feedback: put a big, fat FAQ button somewhere. It took a little while to notice the tiny "learn more" text. My link if anyone wants (if you use, we both get Ex$50k apparently): http://exchangel.co/r/38 http://exchangel.co/r/38
- yuncun 12y agoThis looks really interesting. I love playing football manager, and I always thought there is a niche for business oriented simulation games. I wonder though, are there copyright issues with using these company names, or do they all used with permission?
- kumarski 12y agoThe signup flow isn't working for me.
- ponyous 12y agoSame, click signin. Write email address. It will ask you to signup first.
- brandnewlow 12y agoThe signup link doesn't do anything. And then when you click your one-time sign in link, nothing happened until the third time I generated one.
- zhoujianfu 12y agoHmm.. what browser are you using?
- taylorwc 12y agoSame issue for me. Chrome 43.0.2346.0 canary on OSX
- Udo 12y agoSame here, clicking on signup button doesn't do anything (not even the mouse pointer changes). Latest Firefox on OS X.
- zhoujianfu 12y agoAha.. I didn't realize you aren't supposed to put <a> tags inside <button> tags! It works in a lot of browsers but doesn't in others! FIXED?!
- zhoujianfu 12y agoHmm... what error are you getting? It's working for about 10 people a minute it looks like!
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- lukasm 12y agobug the links is https://angel.co/Akido%20Labs https://angel.co/Akido%20Labs but the correct one is https://angel.co/akido-labs https://angel.co/akido-labs
- zhoujianfu 12y agoThanks! Fixed!
- aet 12y agoDoes this signal a tech bubble? :) It's like those Bravo shows about flipping houses. Very neat idea.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- aet 12y agoPeople take more risk on paper -- it's like your high school stock market contest where the winner put everything on a penny stock and got lucky. Will there be some bias like this?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- mncolinlee 12y agoNo. It's not. It's really unrelated and a good idea. Wall Street S&P500 still beats Venture Capital returns on average and it has PLENTY of fantasy investing. 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.
- dmschulman 12y agoHaha this is a great idea. I know angel investing doesn't necessarily work like traditional stock investing but I'm noticing all the companies on the exchange start at the same price. Is this accurate or should they be valued slightly differently from the onset? 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.
- zhoujianfu 12y agoAh, so actually during the seed it's an auction. When you place your "commitment" to the round, you set a max valuation you'll participate at. Then, when the seed round is over, the price paid is actually the highest "clearing" price, and the company sells 500K to 2M shares.
- solve 12y agoWould be nice if every new VC was forced to use this and share their results with their partners, to learn some humility.
- aarongray 12y agoAwesome idea!
- ryanSrich 12y agoAny reason this only includes YC companies? Sorry if I missed the answer somewhere.
- zhoujianfu 12y agoI just gotta start somewhere, and since I was at demo day this week, I started there!
- Red_Tarsius 12y agoGreat idea, I'm signing up tonight! I already play fantasy stock market, I think other Investopedia users would love to get a taste of Angel Investing as well.
- chralieboy 12y agoThe sign of a great idea: you sold me with the four word HN title.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- PMan74 12y agoPerhaps that VC is of the "If people don't think you are crazy, you aren't thinking big" school 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-think-big http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-03/05/naveen-jain-t...
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- bushido 12y agoI like the idea. 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).
- geverett 12y agoThis is amazing. The first time I used excel was to play the Stock Market Game (http://www.stockmarketgame.org/ http://www.stockmarketgame.org/) in elementary school. The public markets were as bubbly then as private markets are today... I wonder if in 15 years it will be as common to invest privately as it has become to invest publicly.
- nodesocket 12y agoI also did the StockMarketGame in high school (class of 2000). The market was ahhhh-booming. Howerver, I took advantage of the fact that the prices were delayed by 15 minutes (no real-time quotes), by the end of the semester, I think I had over a billion dollars in my account.
- mentat 12y agoIt pays to have a better connection than the other guy, very nice!
- arikrak 12y agoSince the SEC just announced the last part of the JOBS Act, sites like this will soon be able to offer real investing...
- benmathes 12y agoNeeds more angellist API integration. Who do I know at the companies? Who are their current investors? Prominent advisors? etc. etc.
- zhoujianfu 12y agoAgreed! It's all in the pipeline! EVERYTHING! :)
- pmelendez 12y agoThis looks really nice, but I tried to sign up and the button didn't work for me. Is it closed?
- jonlucc 12y agoDumb question, but I'm a scientist and not in this field: how does this work? If I want to commit a certain amount for a certain valuation, how will my "portfolio" grow? By actual valuation placed down the line? Is there a quick guide? I couldn't find one.
- sirbetsalot 12y agoyah this idea will never be smart for one very good reason. The probability of the bottom 99% of VC ever rising up to challenge john doeer, chris sacca and the rest is near zero. 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.
- marrington 12y agoWhat's most interesting about this to me is the ranking of the startups by user demand for the virtual stock.
- petersouth 12y agonoob angel here - what is the maximum valuation box for? I figured if you are investor you want that number as low as possible and the company wants that number to be max big. I tried putting in .000001M but says "must be at least 5M". Is there any reason you would make it bigger than 5M?
- rboyd 12y agoSo that you're in action when the round is oversubscribed.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- zstiefler 12y agoOne interesting addition would be the ability to "short" companies who you think are overvalued.
- pyvpx 12y agoI would argue it's not a proper market place, fantasy or not, without such ability. (meaning, whatever values or data that comes from this is of near zero utility without the ability to short)
- nodesocket 12y agoYou can only short public companies, so why should you be able to short any company in fantasy investing?
- gcb0 12y agolast time i checked, every single fantasy football site also didn't allow you to borrow money from money sharks to try to bet against on a bad line up.
- discardorama 12y agoAt a glance, 34 of the 96 startups listed have "XYZ for ..." in their blurb (35%). Of these, there are 2 Ubers, 2 Slacks, 2 AWS's, and 1 each of Stripe, SolarCity, Nest, Siri, Palantir, Clever, AngelList and AirBnB...
- M8 12y agoIsn't it an accurate representation of the USA start-up arena?
- mhluongo 12y agoReminds me of sandhill.exchange
- ghall 12y agoAs a co-founder of Sand Hill Exchange (http://sandhill.exchange/ http://sandhill.exchange/), we're excited to see many people growing the burgeoning Fantasy VC ecosystem. I like Exchangel's focus on seed stage startups, as I feel this is where the most interesting entrepreneurial energy resides. 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/ http://sandhill.exchange/ soon so you can all skip our waitlist! -- Gerrit Hall Co-Founder, Sand Hill Exchange gerrit AT sandhill DOT exchange
- desireco42 12y agoI don't know how come someone didn't come up with this earlier, but I don't believe it did, so congrats, awesome idea. I already started pretend investing in startups that seem promising.
- foobarqux 12y agoThey did. Sandhill exchange for example.
- desireco42 12y agoI was not aware, thank you for posting.
- samstave 12y agoSort of a tangent, I have the following idea, and would like to see if this idea could be quickly proved out with a fantasy model: 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.
- EwanG 12y agoThe way I have usually seen this expressed is that you take funding that would otherwise go to support/welfare programs, and use it to fund this. The problem becomes one of who is responsible if the particular investment fund/vehicle doesn't perform well enough to even pay back the original $10K? If it's going to be Government directed, then what the US buys and sells becomes a bit of a market mover, and you have to invest "against" that to have any hedge if the person running the US fund guesses wrong. 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.
- samstave 12y agoYeah, that's why a fantasy test model would be interesting to prove this out. 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.
- kriro 12y agoPretty cool but I'm pretty sure most of the 10k@5M I got before reading the actual rules will not clear :D 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
- ics 12y agoI posted my link in a comment below and people seem to be taking advantage of it, though nobody has replied with their own as I was expecting others to. The upside to the bonus is that it makes the game a little more interesting and realistic; some investors simply have more than others and they will affect how the game is played by others (hopefully bringing in more players than making people think that unfair means not fun).
- rboyd 12y agoThe prize is based on ROI anyway, right? So the value in having more capital streaming in just means you have the luxury of adjusting your picks. The trade-off being that you're now obligated to put it all to work.
- elaineo 12y agoThere is a company doing fantasy startup investing with bitcoin: http://sandhill.exchange http://sandhill.exchange
- ghall 12y agoThanks for the mention! As mentioned below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9272670 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
- Gabriel_Martin 12y agoI'm curious if this would ever create value as a prediction market. I've often thought that this exact tool, when used as a prediction market could remove some of the froth of this industry. (Here's a paper Dave McClure wrote about prediction markets, if you're not familiar: http://500hats.typepad.com/files/ChannellingCrowds_DaveMcClure_Release2.0_April2007.pdf http://500hats.typepad.com/files/ChannellingCrowds_DaveMcClu...)
- ghall 12y agoGabriel, 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-exchange-tuesday-nov-4 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-predictive-power-of-tech-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-ipo-valuations http://blog.sandhill.exchange/post/109527449373/january-2015...
- scottkduncan 12y agoSo...insider trading then?
- findjashua 12y agoIt'd be nice if there was also an option to invest in a diversified fund (like Angellist)
- systemtheory 12y agodear god. run for the exits. the day is finally here. 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
- rboyd 12y agothat's cute, because as programmers we generally think you bankers have no idea what you're doing.
- systemtheory 12y agoplease note, i said "left the world of finance". i wasn't a banker.
- rboyd 12y agoSo you're a programmer who knows a lot about finance who thinks programmers don't know anything about finance. 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.
- fiatjaf 12y agoWhy the guy building a cool game like this took its time to write an annoying form that asks for the first and last name AND does server-side form validation to ensure everyone inputs their last name?