AngelList Stack: an all-in-one toolbox to start your company
We talked about it with Sunil Pai, partner at AngelList, to better understand all the possibilities of this new "toolbox" that makes founders' life more manageable.
As the most up-to-date of you will certainly have seen, AngelList recently launched a new tool to make life easier for founders: AngelList Stack.
AngelList is famous in our industry for having simplified things a lot on the investment side (SVP, Rolling Funds, ...), now it's trying to do the same for the other side of the table, for founders.
To learn more about this new tool, we asked Sunil Pai, partner at AngelList, to give us a detailed tour of it.
We had a very interesting meeting in which he explained to us in detail the functioning of the platform and its use cases.
We took notes in order to share all of them with you here on The Valley.
AngelList Stack is a toolbox that allows you, online and in a few hours to:
Incorporate a C-Corp in Delaware, according to the criteria investors expect,
Open a company bank account (with Blueridge Bank),
Set up and manage your cap table (including managing SAFEs and other convertible instruments),
Manage the fundraising process (including sending SAFEs and monitoring the wires),
Take care of the relationship with investors (sending investor updates for example, or setting up the data room)
Manage the scouting and hiring process (even facilitating and supporting startups that intend to be fully remote)
Set up and manage all corporate documents (such as 409A…)
Notes
A couple of notes:
[Important for international founders] Sunil told us that currently, AngelList Stack is only available for startups that have at least one founder with an American SSN-Social Security Number. This is because opening a bank account is much faster with an SSN and for now they aim for a simple and immediate process. BUT! Since there are also ways to do everything you read above even without an SSN, Sunil said that in the next few months they work on setting up AngelList Stack to be used from outside the United States as well.
AngelList Stack is not free, it has a one-time fee of $500.
Toolbox for founders
AngelList Stack is an online platform, accessible via www.angellist.com/stack, which gives you all the tools, ready-to-use, to start a US startup, manage it and scale it.
As Sunil put it:
It's a way to create a fundraising-ready startup with a few clicks.
The idea behind this tool is that "Starting a startup isn't anything new": right now if a founder wants to start a company, she has to reinvent the wheel, getting lost among a thousand links and articles and suggestions on the subject.
AngelList Stack wants to relieve the founders of all these choices and this bureaucracy, giving them a preset "framework" to hit the ground running, to start fast without getting lost in useless details.
Smart defaults
This is why the tool is set up with smart defaults (a concept that I really like): fixed choices, already made by AngelList for the founders, to minimize the possibility of stalling and indecision.
For example, you are not given the option to incorporate a C-Corp based in Nevada, no, you can only start a C-Corp based in Delaware. The Delaware C-Corp is the standard and therefore the founder should not waste time making the choice, since Delaware is the "right" one.
Informed decisions: YES.
Overthinking and getting lost: NO.
Only if you start from scratch
For this reason, for now, AngelList Stack is only for founders starting from scratch: if you already have a C-Corp incorporated, or a bank account open, you cannot connect them to Stack and use them through their interface. You get the full package or nothing.
There are 2 reasons for this mainly:
Smart defaults: they need to be sure you make choices guided by the defaults since the beginning,
The tool is still in its initial phase and many features have not yet been implemented.
Sunil says that in the future it will also be possible to use AngelList Stack having already started a company, simply connecting and aggregating the various external tools on a single management platform, but not yet.
Why we think AngelList Stack is a great tool
(And it’s going to be even better once it’s available also to international founders).
Because the to-do list of a founder who wants to start a company is usually full of a lot of bureaucracy, choices to make, tools to set up, mechanisms to understand.
This can be overwhelming for many and lead to rushed or overthought choices.
AngelList Stack makes a complicated process, simple.
You have a single interface to manage all the bits and pieces of the company.
It's like a "self-driving car" for founders.
Important final note: the fact that there are smart defaults and pre-set tools does not mean that the founder can start a company lightly or without a proper understanding of the choices they’re making.
Let's say that instead of researching about all the possible scenarios, AngelList Stack allows you to research only about those proposed and pre-chosen, which are the only ones that concern you. So, it helps you save a lot of time, but still, it shouldn't be taken lightly (also because if 💩 happens, the responsibility is yours, not AngelList's ✌️).