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Meet Bryce Roberts: The Man Who Challenged AngelList

March 1st, 2011

Bryce Roberts is co-founder of O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV) and an investor worth paying attention to. Roberts is in the news this week because of his high-profile critique of Angellist, the hot new investment network Robert Scoble has called the new Silicon Valley hype machine.

Roberts celebrates 10 years in venture capital this month. He began as part of Salt Lake City's Wasatch Venture Fund (now Epic Ventures), an affiliate of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, in March of 2001. We thought readers might like to know more about this interesting player in the tech community.

"I tend towards a more concentrated approach to seed investing where we make fewer, larger, investments and take an active role in working with the companies we fund. Frankly, I just don't buy the notion that making an investment is akin to throwing a dart in the dark. Worse, I think its a dangerous idea to promote."

-Bryce Roberts,
Why I Deleted My AngelList Account

Since co-founding the OATV fund in 2005, Roberts has made investments in the popular geo-location site Foursquare (where he's a board member), Parakey (founded by Firefox creator Blake Ross and acquired by Facebook), UK-based Path Intelligence, a site dedicated to tracking shopping patterns and "quantified self" fitness tracker service RunKeeper.  As an undergrad, he studied philosophy at Brigham Young University.

Roberts recently offered some interesting advice to would-be fund raisers who've not yet launched their companies.  "If you're looking for funding for a prelaunch product or service, you'll need a to be a very interesting person [or someone] with deep expertise in your field," Roberts wrote in a guest post on Mashable. "Amplifying that expertise through blogs, Twitter, live streams will get you the attention of VCs, too. If you don't qualify as either, all the right intros in the world won't get you VC funding."

You can follow Roberts on Twitter (where he's most active), his personal blog Bryce.vc, on Facebook or on Quora.

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Leela Cyd Ross is a Writer for ReadWriteWeb, joining the team in February, 2011. Her background is in fine art, photography and education. When she's not writing about the world of technology, she can be found baking up some pie or walking in the rain. She's based in Portland, Oregon and also blogs about the local food scene on Apartment Therapy's Cooking site, The Kitchn. Contact Leela at leela@readwriteweb.com.
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