The AngelList has created an interesting problem of too many regular people having exposed to investors. The access to investors was granted to a select few, after they were thoroughly groomed by schools like Stanford, MIT, etc. in the past. With AngelList, there is no secret anymore that VCs exist. They walk like common people on the street. The myth is gone. There is no woo about venture capitals anymore. If anything, the VCs that don’t have access to regular people are looked at in a funny way, understanding that their network is weak. This weakness is capitalized by other VCs that are much closer to the deals and people. The best deals are around people because this is where the grassroots of entrepreneurship is. The bigger the risk, the bigger the reward. Many VCs that don’t have access to entrepreneurs end up getting bad deals. Recently, when I was looking for hiring for senior developer, full stack engineer on AngelList, I received many emails of people that were interested in the job. The problem was that hardly anyone match that criteria. They were young developers, claiming to be full stack developers. I could tell they were trained very well, in terms of knowing all the buzz words. They understood the terminology, talked very well, understood the urgency of startups, but were most interested in either founding engineer, CTO or big chunk of equity. As you can see, this opens up the door for huge recruiting scams, as AngelList continues to expand. I asked one candidate, who had ‘Full Stack Developer’ on their resume, what is a ’Stack’? They couldn’t answer. It almost seems like the fresh out of college to about 2-3 years of experience engineers are missing training, how to be a good engineer. Unfortunately, a lot of older talent pool of engineers have already migrated to India and China where their roots were to begin with. They came in for American Dream, and then when the economy went south, moved back to their countries and created very successful startups there. As a result, China and India economy is on a recovery mode. In America, we are struggling for talent, and the cost of a full stack contractor is $250/hour, to help late staged, troubled startups. I think right now, about 98-99% of the non-technical skills are trolling AngelList, since they opened up the website to everyone without closely watching their cohorts, i.e. who are their users? This is called ‘Dead Cohorts’.