“I WAS at Bin 38 and all I got was this lousy valuation”, read the message on Dave McClure’s T-shirt at a conference in San Francisco this week. The boss of 500 Start-ups, a fund that provides seed capital to entrepreneurs, Mr McClure had the shirt designed to ridicule an accusation that he and several other financiers have been colluding.
The charge was made by Michael Arrington, the founder of a blog called TechCrunch (which was sold to AOL this week). His claim has turned a spotlight onto “super angels”, who run funds that invest in deals considered too small to be of interest to traditional venture-capital firms. In a blog post Mr Arrington said he recently gatecrashed a meeting at Bin 38, a San Francisco wine bar, at which he claimed a bunch of super angels were gathered “Godfather-style” to discuss things like how to counteract rising valuations of young firms and how to keep big venture funds out of deals.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Venture capital: Angels or demons? | The Economist
