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If you’re an investor, your job is to write checks *and* add value. Here’s the paradox of investing in early stage companies today: we all know that the venture capital industry is a hits-driven business but thebest companies/founders don’t need your money. Thanks to platforms like AngelList, early stage money is becoming a commodity — investors need to be differentiated. Keep your deal terms simple, move fast and answer the phone when they call.

If you’re on the government or policy side of things, your job is to make it easy for investors and founders to work in your region. You could help investors via financial incentives (see NRF, Startups Chile, etc) but the fact is that early stage money follows founders now. It’s becoming easier for founders to raise their first round of money without having to move to Silicon Valley full time but, especially as the company grows and thinks about later stage money, founders are likely to follow the money (read: they’llmove closer to the VCs). If you want to kickstart the entrepreneurial vibe in your region, start by making it appealing for founders to locate their companies there. If you do it right, they’ll want to stay where they are for the long term.

Again, it’s our collective responsibility to be a bridge to venture capital and functional expertise — as private citizens and as a country. The United States is where the internet started and, when you think about economic development and job creation, it’s where some of the most successful internet companies have flourished over the past few decades. However, the internet landscape is changing: more people are online than ever before, technology costs have dropped to an all-time low, and early stage capital is becoming a commodity.

As the internet becomes more accessible across the planet, we’re seeing that early stage internet startups can operate from anywhere: as the web gets bigger, the world gets smaller. From an immigration standpoint, it’s incredibly important that we encourage the best startup founders around the world to start their businesses here in the US — after all, they’re less likely to move here once they’ve planted their roots elsewhere and business starts booming.

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

–Maya Angelou

My time here has been so rewarding and I’d do it again if given the opportunity. But, I regret that I haven’t figured out a way to stay on top of things in both my personal and professional life: I’ve lost touch with old friends, thrown wrenches into my personal relationships and left more than a few current/future founders hanging while they wait for me to catch up on email and phone calls.

So, consider this my public apology to anyone that’s felt unimportant because of my actions (or lack thereof) — that’s not the case at all. I’m doing the best I can and, one day, I hope to make it up to all of you for being so incredibly patient with me.

I’ve met a lot of people over the past few months and I’m starting to realize something: you can’t teach intellectual curiosity. You might be able to inspire or briefly encourage it, but you can’t force people to be genuinely interested in learning new things.

Target a niche, launch the MVP early, iterate often and find product market fit as fast as humanly possible. After that, focus on distribution — traction is defensible and, more importantly, you need to be within the top three products within your niche.

The winners take most of the market, everyone else gets the scraps.

The era of competing over technical specifications is over. Users want better experiences from devices, applications, websites, and the offline services they enable. It is no coincidence that interaction design is replacing technical prowess as the primary competency at startups.

I totally agree with the first part of the statement but fundamentally disagree with the last sentence above. Interaction design isn’t replacing technical prowess, it’s requiring startups to have even more of it. After all, those sexy interfaces aren’t going to build themselves.

So, here’s a thought for the founders out there: focus on building the best business you can – regardless of where you’re located. The money will find you, I can promise you of that.

Founders *shouldn’t* be wasting time consciously trying to make their city better – they should focus on building fantastic businesses that will attract other founders to do the same. After all, hackers attract hackers.

Leave the city/regional stuff to investors and politicians – not because they’re better at building community but because they’ll be *forced* to figure it out when the smartest founders start threatening to leave (or when savvy investors try to lure the best startups away).

As much as AngelList has helped founders obtain capital from investors that may not be in their physical backyard, it’s important to recognize that AngelList has given investors the ability to see deals that used to be out of their physical reach.

What I mean to say is that we often hear about how useful AngelList has been to founders. What we don’t hear often enough is that AngelList also helps investors — we get to see even more deals and, subsequently, the bar gets raised for any investments we end up doing.