A fun innovation in financial engineering I saw recently and thought was worth sharing:

I am an extremely tiny angel investor, which means I periodically send small checks to startups in return for an equity investment. This has historically been very toilsome for all parties.

Typically, a startup will be collecting checks from many people like me along with, possibly, a few firms distinctly unlike me (in that they're professionalized and running someone else's money).

Theoretically speaking, every conversation is independent of each other.

Practically speaking angels do not particularly desire to have entirely independent conversations about contractual terms, because they/we rationally believe almost all of the value created happens outside the contract, but even with standardized terms (SAFEs, etc) it toilsome.

Meanwhile, lawyers have to review *everything*, because professionals are professionals and it would be extremely bad news if they missed "Oh whoops 6 years ago we actually promised an angel the moon and stars on a silver chain" in the runup to an IPO.

The cost of legal review and overall annoyance factor (having conversations, chasing down checks, etc) has historically made the minimum viable angel investment +/- $25k.

So here's the cool innovation:

A startup I had promised a check to said "OK, we're doing our friends-and-family checks via an AngelList Special Purpose Vehicle."

It's, effectively, an extremely specialized one-use one-time computer program which pretends to be a company.

AngelList spins up a company. (In this case, the company receiving investment covers the costs here, which are non-trivial but much less than having 40+ parallel bespoke conversations with lawyers.)

Angels invest in that company.

That company invests in the target company.

This means that the people who actually care about the terms angels get only have to review one set of terms, which is the terms being granted to the SPV by the company receiving investment. The SPV takes one line in the cap table (not 40+); decreases toil over life of company.

And instead of the founders having to do their least favorite chore of "Hey Patrick, thanks for your commitment. We're closing soon so if you could please actually hit the wire button that would be great", ~100% of that is handled by cronjobs at AngelList.

There are probably also some benefits on the backend, too.

A startup I invested in back in 2012 exited. Yay! And I got several hundred pages of documents to review as a result of it. Absence of yay.

The ideal UX here is "I trust you. There's a number. Pay me; I tell accountant"

AngelList gets to have the operational teams and software which figure that out for the SPV, which centralizes thousands of otherwise pairwise conversations happening with lawyers and accountants, and then a piece of software spits out a) money and b) tax forms.