Investing is inherently a social activity: founders meet investors, investors recruit other investors to put a check in, then everyone recruits employees to help work on the company.

Strangely, the whole thing is gatekept as some sort of special dance behind closed doors, where you have to know the right people to talk to so they can know the right people to talk to. It's actually strange there isn't some sort of list of angels to refer to if you're searching for other angles, for example. (You could call it... an "Angel Listing" maybe. Weird no one's done that before.)

Some of the more interesting things we have planned for Signed is improving the social aspect of investing, and today there's a new experience for your user profile (here's mine, for example). It looks like this:

Think of it as a quick little overview into your investment background- you can pop some highlights of previous investments up top, put a little background on how you invest, and then select some categories that you invest in so you show up in the investor directory. If you have an Entity set up, you'll be able to use this as a place to collect pitches from investors, too.

This is, of course, all completely optional: everything is private by default, and you can pick and choose which companies and information to put out there (and most importantly, all of your portfolio's financial data and notes are never public).

There's going to be a lot of fun stuff to come in terms of dealflow and other aspects of dealsharing, so sign up for the waitlist if you're interested in grabbing your @handle and onboarding soon!

This goes without saying — although it's becoming harder and harder to see other companies say this — but your data is yours. And the data about your investments is doubly so.

Quick little update today: export your data. Click a button, get all your investment details in a simple CSV for export to other systems, or just as an offsite backup for piece-of-mind.

Venture capital has quite a language of its own. Like any fancy financial discipline, it's made up of a ton of acronyms to make the people in the space work faster and/or feel special.

Part of what Signed is here for is to increase literacy for people just getting into investing and startups, so we've started adding little tooltips across the site explaining what weird term we might be using here. If you're confused by something, give it a little mouseover and hopefully we'll have a nice little explanation for you right there.

Made an announcement, so I guess we can say the beta is open now.

Add your email to https://signed.com/signup to get added to the waitlist; we'll get you on board soon enough!

Gone are the days of just a cryptic logo on the front page; welcome to having a real landing page!

We're getting a bit more public, little by little, as we storm towards launch. This also gives a bit more color on what the hell we're actually building here. So enjoy. Enjoy a landing page. That's a phrase that's never been typed before.

Signed has had public pitches for a bit, but we just gave them a freshen-up with a new design and some improved interactions during the submission form.

You can take a look at Tifo's public submission page if you'd like. All of this helps with tracking the pipeline of pitches and intros you might see as an investor: new pitches get added into your Pitch dashboard, where you can use Signed's tooling to dig into the company further.

If you've made some investments on AngelList, you can now import your entire portfolio directly into your account.

Head over to our Importer and click the "AngelList Imports" link up top to get started. You can do this as often as you'd like; we'll only update the companies and values that have changed since the last time you uploaded your portfolio CSV. Great for the first-of-the-month update you might already be doing across your financial ecosystem today, or if you have the odd one-off update you want to pull into Signed.

We've been working on Signed for a while now, but as we're getting closer to launch, it's time to start to bring things together in blog form so you can use the new hotness right as they come off the press.

So: welcome to the Signed Blog.

Signed,

Signed.