Awhile back I asked my friend Leah Culver about how she tracks angel investments, because I was just getting into angel investing and it seemed weird that everyone just had some shitty spreadsheet setup to keep track of all this stuff:
Anyway, her answer was “a spreadsheet”. And that was the same for all the others I asked then, too.
That was seven years ago. I always figured all these rich angels and VCs who were deep into futuristic next-generation technology would spur some clever tool to track all of their holdings at some point, but that ain’t happen. It’s almost enough to think that this crowd might not have their finger on the pulse of technology after all. HMMMM.
Anyway, I always had some crazy shit in my head that I wanted to see built, and after a couple hundred angel investments and five different attempts (Numbers.app => Airtable => Notion => bespoke app => Notion), I finally build the damn thing: Signed launches today. Sign up at signed.com.
Spreadsheet++
Hey, I’m not knocking spreadsheets. They’re incredible (even for non-profits, too). But I always hated distilling an entire angel investment and my entirety of working with the company down into a single row in Excel. There’s so much more to it!
What’s more, I’d wager 95% of the angel spreadsheets I’ve looked while building Signed are absolutely trash. It’s actually been pretty jaw-dropping, at times; I know some investors running multi-million dollar portfolios through effectively a single row of “company” and “amount invested”. Even “date invested” is hard for some to track down, much less return profile, IRR, PPS, and all sorts of other things you can derive from your financials and the company itself.
You can’t improve unless you first measure. So Signed helps me manage a ton now, and accordingly I’ve never had this much visibility into my own portfolio.
Investing is a social activity
One of the things that’s really bothered me is that investing is inherently a social activity, but it’s done almost entirely behind closed doors: private introductions, cold emails, even literal closed doors to the meeting room. AngelList had a concept of social activity around their offerings, but years ago they’ve fucked off to chase funds and SPVs. So ironically we didn’t even have a List of Angels really anywhere (not sure what we’d call it).
Anyway, now we do: Signed has public profiles and woooooo boy do I have a lot of really cool shit I’m ready to build on top of this in the very near future.
Private markets? Everyone’s an investor.
I’ve been building Signed over the last year or so, and it’s been an interesting time to build something in the private markets: startups are continuing to wait ever-longer durations to make it to IPO, and secondary offerings have caused some big dilemmas for investors and employees alike. None of this is looking like it’s changing any time soon, and it’s a good time to get a handle on all this- even if you’re an employee. Free accounts’ll let you track your employee equity just like an investor does.
And you should: startup equity is a lottery ticket… until you hit it big and then you realize thinking it as a “lottery ticket” was doing you a disservice the entire time. It’s an investment, and you should treat it as such.
ship it 🐿️
So Signed is live now! It’s been in beta for a few months, and though we just have dozens of early users, Signed is already tracking $75M in equity, which is a pretty exciting start. So much more yet to build (and write! — there’ll be plenty of new posts on my blog and the Signed Blog this year as well.) Have at it! signed.com