I Launched AngelBase, an Interview Media for Angel Investors

Something I had been sketching out in casual conversations with Gunmami back at the beginning of March (our first team-up since Slush Asia 2015!) has finally gotten off the ground as a side project.

AngelBase

Over the past few years, as the number of startup M&As has grown, more and more people have started doing angel investing. (Which is a wonderful thing for the ecosystem!)

So I’d love to see more systematic matching in Japan too, the way AngelList does it,

but in reality most of it still gets handled by word of mouth and analog lists in Excel… we’re still at that phase, I think.

That’s why I believe it’s going to matter — having accurate information, and forming a community that puts it out there.

Also, “angel investor” is a single label, but the people behind it are all over the map: founders who have exited their own companies, executives at large corporations, and so on.

Because of that, I often hear about cases where a handful of rich angels lol walk away with close to a majority of the shares in an angel round — honestly a rough deal for the startup.

So I decided to focus on the angel investors themselves,

and by collecting the valuable know-how and insight — their character and their thinking, the concrete actions they take for the companies they back, the etiquette specific to this world —

I hope to dig deeper into angel investing, a phenomenon that is essential to the startup ecosystem. That’s what this media is for.

Updates will probably be irregular, but I plan to publish interviews that are worth reading, keeping quality over quantity (Quality > Quantity) in mind.

There’s a video at the end of each article too, so I think you’ll feel the angel investors’ passion even more directly.

I’d be happy if you read them all the way through.

(The second and third installments are already lined up, so stay tuned!)

• Huge thanks to Ariyasu-san, who gave me a mountain of advice like an angel in the truest sense, and to all the angels who said yes on the spot even though there was nothing to show them yet. Truly grateful.

• By the way, since it was a good chance, I did the design and implementation myself too. I wanted to shine a light on the people above all else, so I used plenty of photos while stripping out unnecessary elements as much as possible, designing it so that the words they spun would land smoothly. lol

That said, there’s still plenty of room for improvement, so I’ll be updating it as I go. lol