Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

AngelPad Gets VC Firms to Commit $100K to All Its Start-Ups

AngelPad, a San Francisco-based start-up incubator led by former Googlers, will now offer all participating start-ups $120,000 — its usual $20,000, plus a convertible note for a hundred grand from two “large well-known Silicon Valley VC firms” that it’s not naming.

The funding is intended to alleviate founder stress and encourage faster product progress, said AngelPad’s Thomas Korte. Competing program Y Combinator has a similar deal to give participating companies $150,000 from DST investor Yuri Milner and Ron Conway’s SV Angel, the so-called “Start Fund.”

Korte said the AngelPad money is not the same: “It’s different. It’s a real investment from a VC firm, rather than just plain capital or quote-unquote free money.”

Korte acknowledged that having funding from the get-go will put more pressure on the companies in his program to make a return for their investors. “It’s probably more of a sense of responsibility,” he said.

AngelPad is two weeks away from starting its third class of 15 start-ups, but has left one spot open for a company that may be enticed by this new funding offer, Korte said.

Korte declined to specify which VCs are putting up the money, but said they focus on investments in B2B, mobile and e-commerce, like AngelPad.

Though AngelPad has a close relationship with Google Ventures, a spokeswoman for Google Ventures said that the firm was not one of the two participants in the new funding program.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald