Etsy: Another Sign Angels Are More Willing To Cash In Early?
As valuations steadily rise for consumer Internet startups, angels appear to be increasingly willing to take some money off the table by selling to secondary investors eager to buy into those companies. That seems to have been the case last Thursday when crafts e-commerce site Etsy raised a $20 million series E round led by Index Ventures. The new round was not driven by founders or VCs looking for liquidity, but instead was “angel liquidity driven,” Fred Wilson, a principal of Union Square Ventures (an Etsy investor), wrote on his blog last Friday. Wilson went on to write that “the main point of this post is we are seeing that angels can get liquidity via these secondary transactions. They don't need to wait for the sale of the company or possibly the IPO. That is a very good thing, for the angel/seed sector, and for the overall venture capital market.”
