AngelList Confidential 2023

The 8th annual AngelList Confidential conference reached new heights this year with 3 days of sessions broadcasted live from our San Francisco office. Surpassing our expectations, the conference attracted over 4,400 attendees and received a hugely positive response and engagement from the community.

We had two goals for the sessions at this year’s conference. The first being to highlight the product advancements AngelList has made in 2023 across our funds, capital, and equity products while also announcing our strategic initiatives heading into 2024. The second was to expand the range of speakers to capture voices throughout the private markets including institutional LPs, law firms, and fund administrators, in addition to fund managers and founders when discussing navigating the ever-changing industry. 

AngelList Confidential 2023 brought together 15 different sessions with speakers including Naval Ravikant, Ryan Akkina (MITIMCo), Andrew Galvin (Propel VC), Sarah Smith (Sarah Smith Fund), Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Gabe Harmon (Standish) and more than 20 others. 

We broke down each day of sessions to share some of the key highlights from AngelList Confidential 2023, as well as recordings of each session.

Day 1

We kicked off AngelList Confidential by featuring a holistic exploration of the private market ecosystem, offering strategic, operational, and data-driven perspectives for industry professionals including institutional GPs, CFOs, and our Head of Data Research. 

AngelList CEO, Avlok Kohli, opened the conference with a keynote during which he shared the product advancements we’ve made in 2023 across our product offerings along with the future vision of AngelList. We also announced two new strategic moves – 1) AngelList’s software suite for private markets is now fund admin-agnostic so any fund can now leverage our software and 2) we’ve launched a Preferred Partner Program (more here) with four select fund administrator partners including Belltower, Cornerstone, 4Pines, and MG Stover.

Now, no matter your fund size or your thesis, the AngelList platform can support your fund.

- Avlok Kohli, CEO of AngelList

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After Avlok’s keynote, our CTO Xinran Xiao and AngelList product leads took the stage to address how AngelList's comprehensive software platform for private markets has been leveraged by institutional firms like Village Global, Galaxy, Pantera, and more to scale custom workflows and decrease fragmentation without sacrificing quality or consistency. To learn more about AngelList’s product offerings, reach out to our sales team.

In the second half of the day we transitioned to fireside chats with industry experts including a conversation led by Jake Zeller (Powerset) with institutional GPs, Salil Deshpande (Uncorrelated Ventures) and CJ Reim (Amity Ventures), on when to deploy capital and how to increase alignment with your LP base. This was followed by a presentation on how to leverage data to identify great GPs and why IRR shouldn’t be used to track future performance by our Head of Research, Abe Othman, PhD. 

We also heard directly from the Managing Director at Standish, Gabe Harmon, as he spoke with Partner and CFO of Eclipse, Greg Lyon, and CFO and CCO of Propel VC, Andrew Galvin, about operational factors that can have an impact on your P&L. They shared how they identify tools their firms can implement to avoid unnecessary losses, save time, and become more efficient. 

Day 2

To start the second day of the conference, Abe Othman and Ramp's Ian Macomber analyzed startup spend and venture data to identify trends from Q3 within the venture capital landscape and their predictions for Q1 2024 and beyond. This was followed by AngelList’s Jim Tomczyk moderating a discussion with two of our new Preferred Partners, 4Pines and Cornerstone Fund Services, discussing how fund managers can ensure that their funds are structurally sound, allowing them to be resilient in any fundraising environment. You can learn more about our Preferred Partners Program here.

From fund partners to fund managers, we shifted gears to a conversation between Eric Bahn (Hustle Fund), Sarah Smith (Sarah Smith Fund) and Rex Salisbury (Cambrian Ventures) as they offered practical advice for GPs on how to demonstrate momentum within your portfolio and have a compelling story to tell in a post-2021 fundraising environment. 

We then pivoted the conversation to hear directly from the institutional investors writing the checks. MITIMCo’s Ryan Akkina, Verdis Investment Management’s Steve Kim, and Accomplice VC’s Chris Yang shared their perspectives on considerations that guide their investment decisions and ways GPs can remove unnecessary friction when capturing new institutional investors.

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The day closed with a fireside chat between CEO Avlok Kohli and AngelList founder Naval Ravikant. During this intimate conversation, they explored the future of venture capital and the evolving role of the technology shaping it.

Early stage valuations should not fluctuate too much. When they do fluctuate, it’s usually because of structural changes in the industry, such as the birth of Y Combinator, for example, or the rise of angel funds or the entrance of venture funds into seed investing as an asset class. Those kinds of things tend to move the needle and they do it structurally and semi-permanently.

- Naval Ravikant, Founder of AngelList

Day 3

After spending the first two days focused on firms and their operating partners, we shifted focus for the final day of AngelList Confidential and heard from the Startups side of private markets. 

AngelList’s Startup Products Business Lead, Sumukh Sridhara, opened the day discussing the complexities of equity management and how AngelList’s software can better support founders and law firms by streamlining workflows and using AI to uncover inconsistencies in cap tables – 5k+ errors have already been found and resolved by AngelList. He introduced the product’s new AI Equity Assistant which allows users to do a multitude of things from asking for data to drafting equity actions for their cap table. To learn more about AngelList’s equity management tools, reach out to our sales team.

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We continued the day with top emerging company lawyers from K&L Gates, Fenwick, and Gunderson Dettmer who discussed strategies for collaborating effectively with legal teams during market downturns and how founders can avoid investor and employee confusion around valuations and option repricing.  

Before Avlok took the stage for his closing thoughts, we had our final panel featuring the founders and CEOs of LangChain, Lamini, and Vercel for an insightful conversation that explored the intersection of AI and entrepreneurship.

...with AI you’re seeing these almost unpredictable improvements in capability, in performance, in quality. You want to be right in that wave. You want to be scrappy.

- Guillermo Rauch, Founder and CEO of Vercel

Next Year

AngelList Confidential 2023 marked a pivotal moment in the conference's history, extending to three days with over 4,400 registrants and broadening the scope of speakers to encompass diverse voices across the private markets, including institutional investors, fund managers, fund operators, law firms, founders, fund administrators, and more.

Thank you to all of our speakers and to everyone who joined us live. You can view a full recap of the conference’s speakers, topics, and all of the session recordings here. We can’t wait to see you all at AngelList Confidential 2024. 

If you’re interested in learning more about how AngelList is building the infrastructure that powers the startup economy, visit www.angellist.com.