I’ve been lucky to work with some of the best angel investors in the business.
When I started Akita, my angel investors were my mentor Jason Hong, superangel Elad Gil, #ANGELS co-founder Jana Messerschmidt, Eventbrite co-founders Kevin and Julia Hartz, Stanford professor Dan Boneh, and NBA player Kevin Durant. I became a more well-prepared and well-connected founder thanks to my angel investors.
When I first became a founder, I had little idea how much working with the right angel investors could help. This post is everything I would tell a first-time founder (who is headed down the VC-funded) route about working angels.
Akita’s fundraising story
The first check into my company was a SAFE from Jason Hong, a fellow CMU professor who has been an incredible mentor, both when I was in academia and after I became a founder. At the time, I had only been out of a PhD with a real job for two years and did not have the savings to bootstrap for long, so Jason’s investment was substantial. Jason’s uncapped SAFE gave me the runway to not worry about raising immediately.
Sooner than I expected, I raised a seed round co-led by Martin Casado at a16z and Mike Vernal at Sequoia. Once the round came together, there was only room for a small number of checks. Martin and Mike both advised strategic angels instead of friends and family to fill out the round, so that’s what we did. They put together a short list of angel investors who had been helpful to their companies and introduced me. We ultimately brought on Elad Gil, Jana Messerschmidt, Kevin and Julia Hartz, and Dan Boneh.
I was at dinner with my a16z investor Martin Casado when I told him I wanted investment from Kevin Durant. It was fall 2018, KD was playing for the Warriors, and he had won Finals MVP earlier that year. I was a KD fan and had heard he did tech investing. Martin said, “How sure are you that you want him?” He sent one text to someone who happened to be walking into KD’s house at that very moment. KD said congratulations and the following week I had Thirty-Five Ventures on my cap table.
My personal experience with angel investors
In 2017-2018, the first year of my company, Julia Hartz was running EventBrite so I worked with Kevin. This was before Kevin started his VC firm A*. During this time, he was spending a lot of time with founders and entrepreneurial folks. Kevin had incredible stories from his experience with Xoom and Eventbrite and I loved learning from him. One conversation that stuck with me: I was telling Kevin how my two lead investors had both interviewed a key product hire for the company. One was positive and one was in the middle. Kevin said to always be “strong yes” or “strong no” if I could help it. I still hire according to this philosophy today.
Jana Messerschmidt was probably my angel investor who was the most generous with her time and introductions. Jana was transitioning from doing angel investing to being a venture capital investor, having just started a job at Lightspeed. As a former exec at Twitter and Netflix, she had a fantastic network and especially in developer experience. Jana introduced me to developer experience executives, founders who had been good at developer experience, and ex-founders who gave great founder advice. Jana gave me great advice about how to leverage my investors: for instance, she told me to make a spreadsheet of customers I wanted warm introductions to and send it around. Jana telling me about how Crashlytics engineered themselves to go viral and introducing me to Jeff Seibert had a huge influence on how I think about developer products.
... continue reading