Inside AngelList’s future: Naval Ravikant

Organisations, like people, can be outliers too. Since December 2016, I have had conversations with 59 individual outliers; a journey where me and hopefully you too, have learned with each episode. With this episode of Outliers podcast, we’re kind of breaking away from the mold and expanding these conversations to companies and organizations that are outliers in the way they behave, their mission, and so on. AngelList has been an outlier from the start in February 2010 when Naval Ravikant along with his co-blogger at Venture Hacks Babak Nivi, started with a group of investors. “AngelList was started to help startups with their most difficult tasks, helping them do that with internet at scale and with the matching engine that makes it possible,” says Ravikant. “AngelList can stumble, AngelList could fall, but I don’t think that will be because technology stops being interesting. It will be because of us,” he adds. So how does AngelList keep relevant? “Relevance just means you change with the times. It’s a hard problem,” says Ravikant. For its part, AngelList has been trying to stay relevant. For instance, AngelList hived off CoinList last year; a step towards shaping the future of investing, according to Ravikant. Then, in 2016, AngelList acquired Product Hunt for $20 million. Now, AngelList is looking to conquer India--a market that can be painfully slow and chaotic, especially given its unpredictable regulatory environment. For AngelList though, India is an important market not just for the narrative sake, but because Naval and his team picked signals of future growth from the country. In August 2016, AngelList hired Utsav Somani to lead its India operations. According to Somani, Indian startups raised close to $2 million in less than 5 months on AngelList India from domestic investors. “When we launched AngelList Talent, it (India) rapidly grew to be the second largest market for us. Right now we are living through the age of China ascending. I think India is going to go through a similar transition. It’s obviously slower than all of us would have liked, but it looks like the giant may be awakening,” says Ravikant. “India’s issue has always been that it’s held back because of regulations and bureaucracy, and unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be getting that much better. “ AngelList is a startup too; an 8-year-old platform born as an email list that has watched and enabled the biggest startups such as Uber and Airbnb. A lot to learn from what AngelList do Here’s Naval Ravikant on the future of AngelList.