OneWire, an employee recruiting platform, has raised $30 million since 2008. That's not bad for a startup, but nor is it an eye-popping amount. What's turning heads in the tech scene is the way OneWire raised it: all from individual investors, and not a penny from venture capital firms.

OneWire has 101 angel investors. David Tisch, an investor who advises early stage startups as the managing director of TechStars New York City, says there's no average number when it comes to angels — but anything more than 10 seems like a lot.

Kerry Rupp, a managing partner at Dreamit Ventures, reacts similarly. "101 opinions can be pretty overwhelming," she says.

And yet overwhelming opinions were exactly what OneWire co-founders Skiddy von Stade and Brin McCagg were trying to avoid by wrangling its funding this way. Startups often raise a small sum from angel investors and then accept a larger sum from a venture capital firm. But for every happy partnership between a venture capital firm and an entrepreneur, McCagg says, there's a sour relationship where a VC took decisions out of an startup's hands.

“The investors do own the majority of the company, but we don’t have an 800-pound gorilla in the room."

"If you have one big investor that is $30 million," McCagg says, "they basically own you and tell you what to do. ... The investors do own the majority of the company, but we don’t have an 800-pound gorilla in the room."

Its unconventional approach to funding doesn't seem to have hurt OneWire. Though not yet profitable, it has hired 50 people, lists companies such as Goldman Sachs and Deloitte among its clients, and occupies 10,000 square feet of office space on Madison Avenue.

McCagg argues that having 101 investors makes sense for OneWire because the success of its all-in-one talent management platform depends upon recruiting large companies as clients. Having those companies' executives as investors doesn't hurt this effort — and every meeting with a potential investor doubled as a sales call.

Every investor in OneWire is no more than one degree of separation from a co-founder. Von Stade ran a headhunting business for 14 years. OneWire is McCagg's third startup. His second, a business-to-business version of eBay, had investors that included Chase Bank, Goldman Sachs, General Electric Capital and eBay.

These are not your average Rolodexes. McCagg says that most of the investors are so wealthy that the amount they've kicked to OneWire, on average about $300,000, is negligible to them.

"None of them put in enough that they want to run the business," he says. "We take their advice very seriously, but it’s not like we have 101 cooks in the kitchen."

“I just hear that they're going to have 101 people telling them what to do, whether or not those people have voting control."

There is no shareholder meeting (McCagg doesn't think that many would show up if there were). The main communication that OneWire has with the majority of its shareholders is a quarterly letter to keep them abreast of the company's activities.

Even so, the prospect of giving 101 different investors — no matter how low maintenance — a stake in one company makes some entrepreneurs wary.

"I just hear that they're going to have 101 people telling them what to do," Rupp says, "whether or not those people have voting control."

Image courtesy of Flickr, jronaldlee