Thread by @awwstn

Ok, here's my thread on How to Become an Angel Investor if You Don't Have Much Money

or at least, how I did it...your mileage may vary obviously

feel free to AMA here or in DMs

https://twitter.com/indysofian/status/1350535405741993984

2012-2015: really wanted to start investing, but had zero cash to do it and didn't really know how to change that.

Then this HN comment from @sama got the wheels spinning in my mind. I texted my brother @stuartdsmith and we started talking about how we could do this.

so, we formed @CoughdropCap started making $10K investments. I literally didn't have a 401K or an IRA (still don't, actually), so while these investments are "small" in startupland, they were a big deal personally. but we really wanted to make this happen

we averaged one deal per year for the first several years. going back to that HN comment -- we were ok with moving very slowly and our stated goal was to build the track record we'd need to eventually invest with OPM (other people's money)

October 2015: our very first investment was in Lattice. @stuartdsmith had been working with @jaltma and convinced me that this was an absolute no-brainer. A few texts from that:

November 2016:

then, a year later, both of us had become power users of Superhuman, so I sent this text to @stuartdsmith which eventually led to us begging @rahulvohra to let us invest

so, this really was a long, slow process. and we definitely have been lucky in the trajectory of those first investments. But, there were hundreds of companies we could have invested in during that time so that luck was absolutely paired with a ton of deliberation

ok, so fast forward to the end of 2018. Lattice has billboards all over San Francisco, Superhuman had just gotten a huge NYT story. @stuartdsmith suggested we finally see if we can wrangle some OPM. We did not have huge ambitions:

we decided to do it. turned out that $100K was too small to make sense given the setup costs. We raised $750K (incl. our contributions of around 10%)

it wasn't easy. We had to talk to a TON of people, got turned down by most, but eventually assembled a wonderful group of LPs.

Our fund is quite a bit smaller than all the hot rolling funds you see out there, but it feels like the right size for us. our intention was never to accelerate as fast as possible, but instead to crawl -> walk -> run

when we were just getting started (2015), it seemed like EVERYONE was an angel investor, and it also seemed like a long, slow process might cause us to miss the boat. but it didn't

also, @naval/@AngelList has made all of this 100x easier than it would've been

it has been such a joy. it's like paying for a front row seat to watch awesome people do their thing. it seemed so out of reach, but now we have this amazing list of portfolio companies!

so if you want to repeat this process, you're gonna need some luck and you're gonna need to risk some cash, but it's entirely doable. financially, we had no business becoming angel investors, but we carved a path

and when you see people who seem to have just snapped their fingers to make it happen...remember 2 things:

1. If they had a trust fund...it's entirely unproductive to be bitter about that

2. if they didn't, it was probably a FUCKTON more work than it looks like from the outside