Don't Let the Noise Distract You

About 10 people have asked me what I thought about #angelgate over the past 48 hours, so I finally read up on the issue to know what was going on. And then I stopped and realized: "Who the f&ck cares?"

Worrying about what so and so said and did with who, and where they were doing it, is exactly what you shouldn't be worrying about if you're working on a startup. Its not healthy and doesn't really affect you*. What does affect you is whether or not you're focusing on an "area of execution" for your business on that day.

Did you call the number of customers you wanted to? Did you interview enough candidates for that job? Did you figure out a new way to optimize conversions?

If you didn't get to these areas of execution, but you did worry about VC/angel collusion for even a split-second, you just lost value in your company you can never get back.

Get back to work, people.

*Why it doesn't affect you: You don't have to worry about it because a) if there was collusion around your deal, you'd feel it -- a disrupted market will look obvious -- and if you feel anything icky, you should get the hell out of dodge because bad money is never, never worth it; and 2) it probably didn't happen.

If your company is actually fundable, in this market you will have competition for your deal... so much so that investors would rather crowd out other investors than collude to screw you. Fred Wilson makes this point better and from a more experienced view than me, but it's just logical. The explosion of seed and A-round capital these days is insane and means that fewer and fewer deals would ever get caught in some dank, collusion-friendly market dynamic.