AngelList Scouts find high-quality startups for the angels on AngelList. When a Scout tells us to look at a startup, we pay attention.

Update: Liz Gannes covers this story for GigaOM.

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We’re recruiting a product designer for AngelList. Here’s how we’re doing it and what we’re learning. (If you’re interested in working with us, details are at the bottom of this post.)

I didn’t start by putting up a job post. I figured if everybody else is doing it, I need to take a different approach. So I called the smartest designers and entrepreneurs I knew and asked them for advice. Here’s what I’ve learned:

• We want a product designer. This job post from Quora defines a product designer as “Extraordinary product, interaction, and visual design talent [with] a curiosity and passion for crafting amazing experiences.” Product design encompasses visual design, interaction design, branding… it’s the whole user experience.
• A small team like ours should hire designers who can build what they design. At a minimum, that means building HTML, CSS, perhaps JS, perhaps beyond. See these posts by Jason Putorti and Rebekah Cox for more info. Also read Rebekah’s Early Quora Design Notes.
• Quora has the best job postings I’ve seen in a long time — they’re muscular and much better than all the quirky job postings in the world.
• Consultants are good if you want to build the product. Full-time people are good if you want to build the team. We want to build the team.

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This Xconomy article by Wade Roush does a great job of telling the AngelList and Venture Hacks story:

In Seed Funding Race, AngelList Sorts the “Junk” from the “Maybes”

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Quora is a Q&A site. We were planning on posting a question asking startups and angels to share their AngelList experience. But someone beat us to it:

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Last week, Naval and a slew of angels shared their investing advice with an audience of angels-in-training at AngelConf 2010. Here’s the video (each talk is 7 minutes long):

Video: AngelConf 2010

Wade Roush at Xconomy took detailed notes on all the talks and published them here and here.

7 angel investing tips

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I use Twitter favorites to keep track of AngelList testimonials. I just favorite the testimonials I like. It’s super easy:

And it’s trivial to embed them anywhere:

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Paul Graham says “The future [of funding] is no fixed amount, no fixed closing date, and no lead.” In other words, the future of financing is continuous, not discrete.

This post explains how to raise a seed round with no lead, no fixed amount, and a fluid closing date. The process is called mass syndication, or a party round.

Paul proposes eliminating rounds altogether, but we’re not there yet. Mass syndication is a single continuous seed round and I think it’s the state of the art in continuous fundraising.

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Today we’re announcing that LearnBoost has raised money with AngelList.  LearnBoost makes an “easy-to-use online gradebook for teachers.”

LearnBoost was referred to us by two-time Power Broker Harper Reed. They used AngelList to contact George Zachary and Jeff Fagnan who invested:

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Today we’re announcing that Thumbtack has raised money with AngelList.  Thumbtack is “your marketplace for local services.”

Thumbtack got their first commitments at Open Angel Forum, from Joshua Schachter, Cyan & Scott Banister, and Jason Calacanis. Then they used AngelList to contact Ariel Poler and Auren Hoffman who invested:

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Fred Wilson reviews AngelList:

“…The old model of angel deals is alive and well. Angels love to share deals with each other. It is how angel rounds come together. But AngelList adds at least two things to the mix. First, it adds a place where the deals can come together online. And second it adds people to the mix that would not be part of the offline deal sharing networks that already exist.

“I am on AngelList. I see all the deals come together. I don’t personally invest in angel deals in the web/tech space because of potential conflict with USV down the road. But even so, I find it immensely useful to see what companies are getting traction in the angel market. It’s part of my radar/early warning system. And it is entirely possible that we will decide that USV needs to participate in an angel round that is coming together on AngelList, although that has not yet happened.

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