I really liked this post by Danielle Morrill about her fantasy portfolio and figured I’d put mine together. Considering there are fantasy stock trading and stock trading games… it would be interesting to see an online early stage fantasy portfolio site or if SeedInvest or Angel List would add this feature. It could be instructive for investors to learn with prior to becoming accredited or prior to making their first angel investments. Especially if your fantasy portfolio must meet these requirements
- Max portfolio starting size of $5M
- Companies can be added over time.
- All companies must be private
- Existing positions can only be adjusted on liquidity events.
- Percentage ownership should be declared and investing more will eat into your fantasy dollars.
I’ll update later with percentages and so on. There are also a few Seattle startups I’d like to include but haven’t yet. Btw, if you want to watch me make an investment in a local, Seattle early stage startup company – come by the 5th Seattle Angel Conference this Thursday.
Robinhood – uh… duh – zero fee stock trades! This is huge for a lot of reasons, the one I think is most interesting is that there already is a lowest cost provider out there (Interactive Brokers) and the current lowest cost provider has already built a model around how to offer a low cost service and charge for everything else. Robinhood has an advantage here in that they truly can be the lowest cost service and then innovate on the value-add side of things to not only beat the other brokers out there, but Interactive Brokers as well.
Twilio – Want to program sms & voice communications into any platform? Communication and connection are a key in a world where the population is increasing and the number of people in the population is already so large that it is hard to offer a personal touch to communications. While these are programmatic tools to somewhat personal forms of communication, they are critical to connecting with people.
Sendgrid – Want to program email communications into any platform? Not much different than Twilio in that they provide this infrastructure service that can integrate with any platform. As mid-size and enterprise businesses begin to increase their online presence they will continue to push beyond basic email functionality of other providers. Cloud based email solutions will continue to defer mass-email delivery to specialists and sendgrid is best positioned to take that traffic programmatically.
Fitbit – We used to wear watches, now we wear fitbits. I see more people with fitbits on their hand than I see people with watches on their hand. This is huge and it is an amazing sign for fitbit. There is an incredible amount of potential competition trying to enter the space. So far there hasn’t been anything significant though and that is fairly amazing. What else is fairly amazing? How much traction Fitbit has a private company that sells hardware.
Uber – I didn’t used to be a fan because Uber was always more expensive than a taxi. I’m a cheap guy so thought it was pretty lame. I used to travel a lot and honestly never had a problem getting a taxi “the old fashioned way” or through any of the various taxi apps around the country. What really did it for me though was a recent trip I was on where I used UberX a few times. I was amazed – the price was lower than the exact same trip in a taxi, I still received white glove service, and the whole thing was hassle free. UberX is a game changer for them, especially if I can always choose to upgrade when I feel like it.