Hello, I hope you'll give me the chance to work with you! This guide is for you to learn more about how to use me as an investor and what you can expect from working with me. You can learn more about my background here and read some of my writings on my Substack (fictional + non-fiction) and general thoughts on investing & building on Twitter.

tl;dr As a strategic angel / venture investor I can help you with product and go-to-market strategy, engineering leadership/recruiting/coaching, human-centered design, data science & machine learning strategy, regulatory/privacy/security, and institutional investor introductions, in addition to the capital I invest. You can find a selection of my portfolio here.

My aim is to provide more value than just capital, in less time so that you can focus on building your business.

🗺️ Product strategy & management

As an early stage entrepreneur, you probably are the Product/Eng/UX lead in one person, and that is a hard balance. It is important to make sure that you maintain a product first mentality in your early days.

• 0 to 1 product development I coach founders through how to think holistically about product from vision to day to day accountability. I've been in the trenches creating 0 to 1 products as an entrepreneur and embedded within larger organizations.
• 1 to N product development: I have also worked across mature products with 2B+ users like YouTube and have experience scaling incipient product efforts to larger scale efforts with mature commercialization options.
• Product management organization development: I've built multiple teams from scratch including how to hire your first PM, designer, and engineering team.
• Fractional CPO/VP/Director product executive advisorship: I can be a fractional CPO/VP/Director product executive advisor until you hire a full-time role and help you make the right decisions early on.

🚀 Go-to-market strategy

• Market intelligence: As a product manager, I think market first, and am always with my ear to the ground when it comes to customer empathy. I can slice and dissect a new market with ease and tell you the best entry points and hypotheses to test without you wasting weeks or months on this effort.
• Scrappy commercialization tactics: I've built multiple 8-figure revenue streams from scratch using a variety of scrappy / guerrilla B2B and consumer marketing tactics that result in positive unit economics. I used a combination of Meetup and Craigslist to get a consumer startup off the ground with tends of thousands of users with a spend of <$100. I've developed a cold calling system supplemented by warm referrals to close contracts with some of the top Medicare Advantage plans with sales cycles <3 months long.

💻 Engineering leadership, recruiting & coaching

• Building engineering teams from scratch and/or scaling: I've built top-performing engineering, product and design teams from scratch, including at brand new startups (Enfluence.io) and nonprofits (Peterson Center on Healthcare), which would normally be considered less desirable than big tech or hot startups. I can tell you how to architect your team for high performance and how to deal with a number of issues like performance management, upgrading your team and more.
• Recruiting: I know how to deploy multiple strategies to find and bring on the right candidates: 1) in my network, 2) in your network, 3) in the ether outside of those mutual networks. As a former data scientist, I think of the approach as creating a model, fine tuning the parameters and testing out your model on a test set and iterating continuously until you have an amazing recruiting pipeline.
• System design: I am agnostic to how you architect your systems, though am privy to using fast frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Postgres to get started quickly, even if newer offerings are available.
• Executive coaching: I can also serve as a part-time executive coach, being a sounding board to help you frame situations appropriately and come up with productive solutions to difficult interpersonal situations. While I try not to lean heavily on frameworks, I'm a big fan of nonviolent communication and crucial conversations.

💰 Investor introductions

I realize that many venture investors are out of reach for the average founder and I can help make the right introduction with connections.