AngelGate Is “100 Percent Accurate,” Says Michael Arrington
Last night, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington reported that on Monday night, a group of high-profile Silicon Valley angels met at a San Francisco restaurant, where, Arrington said he later learned, “collusion and price fixing” were on the menu.
Context & Ripple Effects
The story lands at the intersection of two threads the corpus has been tracking. The first is Arrington's own arc: a 2007 Wired profile documented how the TechCrunch blogger could generate buzz and cash, making him both an ecosystem gatekeeper and a commercially interested party. The second is the super-angel scene itself — just a week earlier, TechCrunch published Ron Conway's confidential investment guide mapping where the most prolific angels were putting money.
Against that backdrop, Arrington's follow-up matters because he is not walking anything back: he declares the collusion-and-price-fixing account "100 percent accurate," converting a rumor into a standing accusation against some of the Valley's most active early-stage checkwriters. The pickup across outlets — including angel Dave McClure's own blog and TechCrunch's exclusive on the Bin38 menu — shows how fast the story traveled through the very network it indicts.
First-order effects
- The angels reportedly at the Bin38 meeting face immediate reputational damage with founders, who now have public grounds to suspect their term sheets reflect coordinated terms rather than independent judgment.
- Arrington and TechCrunch have staked the site's credibility on the report, while simultaneously deepening the conflict-of-interest question around a publisher who covers — and is covered by — the same investor class.
Second-order effects
- Angels are being forced to respond publicly rather than privately: McClure's same-day post shows the accused using their own blogs to shape the narrative, effectively turning the story into a fight over disclosure norms for early-stage deal terms.
- Founders and other investors gain leverage in negotiations, since any angel whose terms look uniform across the group now risks being framed as part of a cartel — pressuring participants to differentiate pricing and terms visibly.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, informal closed-door coordination among super-angels gives way to more formalized, transparent structures — public syndicates, stated standard terms — as the price of staying fundable in founders' eyes.
- The episode hardens scrutiny of the blogger-investor model itself: outlets like TechCrunch wield agenda-setting power over the same community whose deals they cover, a structural tension the 2007 Wired profile flagged years before AngelGate made it front-page.
The trend: Silicon Valley early-stage investing is entering a phase where informal angel coordination gets dragged into public view, with media operators inside the ecosystem both exposing and amplifying the conflict.