“As someone working in tech, how can I get into angel investing?”

I’ve made ~10 angel investments the past months and here’s how I went about it (thread)

1. Big tech alumni. After I quit Uber I got invited to the Uber alumni investment club. Huh? So apparently these exist
1. (Cont’d) Facebook has one, Uber has one, and a bunch of other companies (even smaller ones). They’re places you can see deals come in, and put in from very small checks.

Granted this was lucky, but seeing dozens of pitches over months was helpful in learning on the side.
2. Help founders/startups without expectations.

My first investment came well after I talked with a founder from my network, offering advice, help and feedback as it was an area I was experienced in. When they later raised, I offered to join in, and it made perfect sense.
3. Know what you bring to the table. I only invest in companies where on top of believing in the team, I can help with something: experience, hiring or network. What do you bring to the table, beyond a small amount of money?
4. Know why you do it.

I invest with the expectation that I can lose all my investment. I invest in companies/teams where if this happens, I’m still okay with it.

Why do I do it? To both help these startups (who have odds stacked against them) and also learn as we go.
5. Play games you want to win.

As a small-time angel investor, you’ve got tiny chances of turning profits.

This is not the game I play. I play the game of being involved in startups I’d love to work at/work with, and investing gives the second best option of getting involved.
The companies I’ve invested in: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/investing/
One last point: if you invest, work with an accountant to understand tax implications upfront.

This advice is more relevant for some countries than others. Eg in NL there’s no capital gains tax (yay!) but there’s annual wealth tax after assets - that include investments.

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More from @GergelyOrosz

15 Dec
"I just got a 12% raise at my company as part of the regular pay adjustment. It's because my director noticed someone in the same role made this much more than I do."

A real story, and a common one. Let me tell you how compensation and open salaries at Netflix work in practice:
1. Pay. Netflix pays top of the market... in cash. No equity (although you can ask for it). No bonuses. Just cash. A LOT of it.

How much? As much as competitors (Google, Meta, Amazon) etc pay and they move upwards with them when needed.
2. (Kind of) open compensation. Everyone who is at director or above at Netflix can see the compensation of *every* other Netflix employee - upwards as well. It's all cash, so they see one (big) number.

We're talking 1,000+ people. Unheard of at any other similar size company.
Read 8 tweets
13 Dec
If you work in tech, #TechTwitter is the place to learn, keep up to date and get inspired.

Follow the right people and you learn something new every day.

Here are 20 tech folks I always pay attention to. They tweet no fluff. Plus details on what to expect when following them:
1. @johncutlefish. One of the most inquisitive thinkers in product management. Asks questions that we should all be asking.

Tweets about: the beautiful mess of product management, engineering and the art of getting things done.

Sample of what to expect:
2. @rakyll long-time principal engineer at Google, now at AWS.

As an engineer, I just nod to almost all tweets of hers. They hit too close to home.

Tweets about: software engineering, engineering culture, and hard truths.

Sample of what to expect:
Read 20 tweets
13 Dec
An inconvenient fact: the most practical - and a very commonly used - use case for cryptocurrencies is to run Ponzi schemes, and cash in from them.

Someone creates a new currency, promotes it, and those getting in early make massive profits, at the expense of later customers.
Ponzi schemes are typically banned by governments when too many people lose money - which eventually always happens.

The unregulated and cross-border nature of crypto is the reason these schemes can go ahead.

A history of Ponzi schemes: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_P…
An example of a Ponzi scheme is Techlead creating a coin that has all characteristics of a Ponzi scheme. There's no value in it beyond buying early enough, then selling it.

The person making a profit of millions? Who created this useless coin: Techlead.

Read 4 tweets
12 Dec
I cannot shake the similarities between the Dotcom Boom and web3:
- Huge hype
- A technology most people don’t understand
- Few practical/real-world use cases
- Incredible returns in the span of months (then: IPOs. Now: tokens)
- Lots of naysayers
- Celebs/influencers involved
For the Dotcom Boom, there was the Dotcom Bust.

It’s impossible to predict if this will follow: but I do predict a crypto winter. All crypto startups need hypergrowth in users/revenue to survive & success depends on mainstream adoption.

I expect some adoption: not mainstream.
Some characteristics are similar:

Dotcom Boom companies paid a *lot* more for employees, with the expectation of becoming millionaires in 6-18 months.

Same thing is driving the hiring success for web3 companies who are burning cash like there’s no tomorrow, paying above market:
Read 8 tweets
12 Dec
One very interesting trend I’m hearing: everyone is struggling to hire senior engineers, designers, tech leads.

Except.

Some well-funded web3 projects that are smashing it thanks to excitement, cash compensation + (token)upside.

Keen to learn more on this. (DMs also open)
A huge difference to early-stage startup hiring vs early-stage web3 hiring: equity. Startup equity is illiquid till exit (5-10 years)

web3 tokens are liquid as soon as they vest.

Solana founding employees 100x’d in a year, those joining in July already 10x’d. And they can sell!
How do some of these places hire? The opposite of big tech:

“They found me over Discord after they saw my open source contributions. Two chats with founders, no Leetcode. Offered 500% (!!) more than what I make, in USDC. I saw no reason to not accept and now I kinda like it.”
Read 5 tweets
11 Dec
The biggest challenge the software engineering industry has today is not related to engineering.

It's related to teaching.

How can we train (very) junior engineers to get to a level where they are autonomous enough, in a reasonable timeframe? Can we do this in a remote setting?
All the while in the industry, the most experienced engineers are busy building the next framework that does an incrementally better job than before and adds another layer of complexity.

What if these people - naturally suited to teach - would be incentivized in doing so?
You don't need to look further than web development to see the contradiction.

Take React.

The API is ever-changing. Documentation is lacking. Onboarding is non-existent. Junior engineers are overwhelmed trying to learn the ever-changing React as their first frontend framework.
Read 9 tweets

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