Mr. Cohen.

New York Angels, a loose affiliation of angel investors that hear pitches and conduct diligence together, just announced that vice chairman Brian Cohen will take over as chairman. He replaces David Rose, founder of the group that has invested more than $45 million in the last ten years.

Mr. Cohen is heavily involved in running the organization's small staff and coordinating the Angels' monthly meetings. As chairman, he will "focus on making the New York Angels the hallmark mentor organization to the exploding startup community in New York City," according to a press release. He also plans to expand the group's presence outside of New York.

Mr. Cohen, who was the first investor in the web's social media darling of the moment, Pinterest, is hoping to give the Angels a bit of an update. He plans to increase the organization's speed as well as its reach "to make it easier for aspiring entrepreneurs to get funded faster by smarter angels," according to the release. Mr. Cohen will expand the organization's mentorship and education programs, and hopes to partner with more angel investor groups across the country.

A decade ago, New York Angels was the only game in town. Today, with money flying fast, the Angels network has fallen a bit behind. New York has a growing number of startups, but it also has an increasing number of angel investors interested in seeding them.

New York Angels is not a fund and does not invest collectively, though members collaborate on due diligence. Each member makes individual investment decisions. The New York Angels process includes, as we wrote last year, an online application, a pitch to a screening committee, a meeting to refine the pitch, a second pitch at the monthly breakfast and a due diligence meeting before the interested angels will follow up with the entrepreneurs individually.

The network's sluggishness prompted one entrepreneur, Adam Neary, to call the process "broken." By contrast, the angel group Founder Collective is known for being efficient. And given that a room of 500 investors now has only 24 hours to decide whether to give money to a Y Combinator startup, the Angels have found themselves shut out of a few deals.

Could this be a new era for the Angels? Mr. Cohen has created the OPEL Award for Entrepreneurial Service Leadership in New York City, established liaisons with New York University and Columbia University, and created a “Future Angels” internship program for MBA and finance grad students. New York Angels is also working on its refreshed database, Gust, which is similar to AngelList.

Mr. Cohen also has "made it a requirement for every member of the New York Angels’ Board of Directors to contribute in some significant way to improving the opportunities for bright entrepreneurs in New York City."

via LinkedIn

Pinterest, the only hockey-stick startup with the distinction of being embraced by women and Mormons, gets the full New York Times treatment today with a profile by Jenna Wortham, well-timed to the clusterfuck hullabaloo currently underway in Austin. While other startups clamor over themselves to preach to the choir and woo early-adopters, Pinterest user base began in Des Moines, Iowa, where cofounder Ben Silbermann grew up.

While the startup's hearting-the-heartland approach has caused "some headscratching" at SXSW, its also infected investors with a wicked case of envy. "It defies the mold that you have to build something for New York and San Francisco and then spread it out from there," Chris Dixon, who is slated to interview Mr. Silbermann on stage tomorrow, told the Times, adding, "Everyone’s envious. I’m envious. I wish I was an investor. I wish I’d created the site.”

One investor who may be immune? New York Angels founder Brian Cohen, who also has the distinction of being Pinterest's very first investor.Mr. Cohen tells Mashable how he met Mr. Silbermann and cofounder Evan Sharp when the two were just "a couple of young guys from NYU" at a business plan competition. (Mr. Silbermann's LinkedIn profile, however, lists him as alma mater as Yale.)

According to Mr. Cohen, what distinguished Pinterest, which went through 30 to 40 iterations, was the founders' ability to listen:

That listening started with a different product Silbermann was working on at Cold Brew Labs — an app called Tote. The idea was the first woman’s fashion catalog on the iPhone. Cohen told me Silbermann watched user behavior on Tote. “As the app was being used, he recognized that women were grabbing, tagging specific items that they were able to view later when they got home,” said Cohen. What Silbermann saw was that huge numbers of people were grabbing items and sharing them with friends. “He recognized that these women were sharing their tastes.”

Betabeat has mentioned before how Pinterest's boards and aspirational/consumerist bent look to us more like the next-generation of those snail-mail catalogs, except one you in create yourself. The Times likens it more to scrapbooking.

In search of Mr. Silbermann's New York University connections, we came across this video of a speech he gave at NYU-Stern in 2010, where he discussed the idea of collecting, something he used to do with bugs and stamps as a young boy in Iowa. Moving that impulse online, he said, is "fundamentally changing the way regular people discover the things around them":

Why is collection so basic to who we are? I think the answer lies in self-expression. If you walk around Brooklyn and ask people how they express themselves. Everyone's a musician or an artist or a filmmaker. But most of us aren't that interesting. Most of us are just consumers of that. And when we collect things and when we share those collections with people that's how we show who we are in the world. That's how we express our taste to the people around us."

Not that Pinterest, which boasts $40 million in financing, needs our help with the pitch. But we might stick with "regular" folks and leave out the less interesting part going forward . . .

Steve Gutentag from Sitesimon.

Betabeat moseyed up to Murat Aktihanoglu, the accented managing director of Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, after the program's demo day this morning in a basement auditorium at NYU's Stern School of Business. He had the overwhelmed, flushed face of a proud parent. "Oh, it was amazing," he said, eyes widening. ERA put its ten startups through 1,500 meetings, he had calculated, and all the companies have users and 80 percent have revenue. One of them had just signed up 35 cities and two Dubai landmarks: the biggest mall in the world, which serves 47 million visitors, and the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. 

"That was incredible!" said Brian Cohen, vice chairman of the New York Angels, ambushing Mr. Aktihanoglu at the podium. "Grand slam!" He pinched the director's cheek. "Murat is magical. He really is."

Mr. Cohen was impressed by the startups. "I go to all the demos," he said. "I was just at DEMO--I went to TechCrunch," he said. "This was quality."

The room was about three-quarters full--perhaps 300 attendees or so--including representatives from Union Square Ventures, TechStars, Founder Collective, Greycroft, Bessemer Ventures, and Bloomberg Ventures. Judging by the lines at the startups' tables, Public Stuff (who signed up the mall), Sitesimon and BuzzTable were the favorites.

Below are the startups and their raises:

Bespoke Post: Curated mail subscription service for products men want. Seeking $500,000.

Centzy: Comparison shopping engine for local services. Raised less than $100,000 of $500,000.

WebThriftStore: Provides a private label eBay solution for charities that enables anyone to turn their unused "stuff" into tax-deductible donations. Raised $625,000 out of $1.5 million.

BuzzTable: Establishes a direct line of communication between restaurants and customers. Raising $750,000.

Pricing Engine: A business intelligence service for digital marketers. Just started raising a $750,000 round.

LetGive: Provides a platform that connects application developers, charities and socially-conscious consumers. Seeking $750,000.

Parking Panda: A mobile real-time parking discovery tool. Has $50,000 committed for a $750,000 round.

PublicStuff: Enables cities to easily receive and manage service requests from citizens. Raised $100,000 out of $750,000 so far.

NumberFire: Analytics platform that uses quantitative modeling to analyze sports. Raised $400,000 out of $750,000.

Sitesimon: Analyzes browsing behavior and recommends web content with minimal user input. Raised $500,000, seeking $3 million.

Too many angels bubble the cloud

A little over two months ago Betabeat weighed in on the state of NY Angels, a group that gained a lot of visibility and respect for backing tech projects during the dark years following the dot-com bust. Every so often a media outlet will cover a NY Angels event or interview one of their executives. The latest is from Xconomy, which is ramping up its coverage of the local tech scene.

Xconomy's Arlene Weintraub sat down NY Angels vice chairman Brian Cohen. When we last spoke with Cohen, we asked why the group's portfolio, which has its own page on the website, didn't show any investments after 2009. "We are building a new website, so check back in 60 days," Mr. Cohen told us.

Well, it's been 100 days, and the site looks exactly the same. In his discussion with Mr. Weintraub, Mr. Cohen reveals that the group is aggressively adding members. The idea, he says, is to bring more "smart angels" into the mix, because there are "scalable startups" that can't find enough capital.

That sounds nice, but it's simply not the case. Their is a glut of money ready willing and able to be invested at the seed and early stage of tech companies in New York City. The best companies can afford to be very choosy about who they bring on, usually picking angels who can provide more than funding. Business development and connection to top engineering talent is what separates angels from the pack these days.

The NY Angels model, in which retired bankers, doctors and lawyers would cut $25,000 checks and make decisions by committee, was in demand from 2001-2008. Adding more of these folks to the mix by expanding the ranks won't help to convince local entrepreneurs that the NY Angels is a smart place to go for funding.

What NY Angels really needs to get back in the game is a series of smart, highly visible investments or social proof in the form of endorsements on the blogs and Twitter feeds of well respected investors and founders in Silicon Alley.

After 13 weeks and a commitment from one member to lead the round, Mr. Neary ended up with nothing when the investor missed his closing deadline. "No doubt, there are a handful of credibly amazing investors who attend their meetings, but from my perspective, clearly the New York Angels process is broken."

On Twitter, several investors voiced their assent. "It's about time somebody had the balls to talk about their true experience working with angel groups," wrote Zelkova Ventures co-founder Jay Levy. "It will be very interesting to see if the NY Angels tries to learn from recent criticism or gets defensive."

Mark Birch, an independent local angel investor, retweeted Mr. Levy. "The NY Angels process is broken, because their model has stayed the same, while the environment has changed," Birch told Betabeat by phone. "At a certain point in time they were one of the only entities investing in early stage tech, and that was invaluable, but now they are just one of many options."

One early stage venture capitalist who asked to remain nameless, said he explicitly tells entrepreneurs he meets not to pitch NY Angels. "Everything there suffers from being decided by a giant committee."

Brian Cohen, the Vice-Chairman of NY Angels, admits the group may have fallen a bit behind the times. "There is an emphasis on speed now, and that is something we are going to work on. But we have a process, a set of best practices, that let us make educated investments."

The process, as detailed by Mr. Cohen and in the original blog post by Mr. Neary, include an online application, a pitch to a screening committee, a meeting to refine the pitch, a second pitch at the monthly breakfast, a due diligence meeting and then follow up by interested members. "We're looking to tap the wisdom of the collective," says Mr. Cohen.

But Mr. Cohen insists that the group is still New York's most vital resource for seed stage funding. "I don't think anyone can come close to the number of deals we have done over the last five years, around $21 million in 35 New York companies."

Mr. Cohen says he understand why entrepreneurs are turning to services like Angel List, the online platform that matches founders and investors. "It's possible for them to raise a lot of money very quickly on there. But that doesn't mean that the backers are going to get a return."

Betabeat asked why NY Angels website, which displays a large portfolio of companies, stopped showing new investments after 2009. "That list is a little out of date," said Mr. Cohen. "But we are building a new website, so check back in 60 days."