This is just one early-stage founder’s feedback though I’m not going to comment on the data here (which I don’t know enough) or in the aforementioned post, but I will say that I think what Richard Bagdonas was speaking to in his post is very real for early-stage founders like me. I mentor four other startups trying to get angel funding and I assume they’ll be looking for VC funding in a year or so, and the situation isn’t ideal.

In my honest opinion, just from building a broad angel network, the problem I’m observing is that founders here in Austin listen to other founders, whereas investors listen to other investors, and in Austin there seems to be not enough overlapping convos where we work together instead of against one another.

Case in point, I’ve emailed Venu around 8–10 times over the last two years to try and pitch my startup Localeur. Every email has gone unanswered except when I went out of my way to introduce my friend and adviser Joe McCann (former BVer, CEO of NodeSource) when he was raising his first round for his company (before he moved to Silicon Valley) and Rich Robinson (CIO of SunPower) who is looking to support some startups as an adviser given his technical background from Bazaarvoice and other companies. You could argue, at this point, that I’ve tried to offer more value to a VC than the VC has offered to my startup or me as an entrepreneur.

Actually, LiveOak is one of the few Austin firms in which I have not once been sent an email, asked out for lunch or been asked to meet with or pitch a single general partner. Mind you, Live Oak’s site says, “Primarily first institutional capital — seed and series A investments” and Localeur is considered one of the most promising early-stage, pre-A startups in Austin based on the data and local publications.

Even if after a meeting or an in-person pitch, the answer will be no, we as founders are often times not getting hard data about why that “no” is or given the opportunity to build a relationship with a local VC in a town that is truly too small for this to be the case.

The environment Richard was speaking of, based on my read, was one in which the VCs here aren’t as active as founders would desire (more take than give), early-stage opportunities are often overlooked or ignored altogether and the Silicon Valley firms swoop in and get startups like RigUp that seem almost custom-built for Austin VCs.