#120
Another birthday has come and gone for #ANGELS! We decided to take on this endeavor five years ago over drinks celebrating one of our actual birthdays and formally launched several months later. As we pass this milestone we are taking stock of what we’ve built to date and where we’re headed.
It takes years to know if you’re any good at early-stage investing. While we’ve had many exciting “markups” (to use industry parlance), true financial results — realized returns on invested capital — take years to materialize. And equally important are the other ways of being “good” that matter: like whether your walk consistently matches up to your talk in supporting founders. Our differentiation at #ANGELS has always been the depth of our in-the-trenches, company operating experience — and this is what we repeatedly hear makes us stand out for our portfolio companies.
We are still in the early years of what we expect to be a decades-long partnership, but on our fifth anniversary we would be remiss not to share an update on our progress and what we’ve learned along the way.
We’ve invested in over 120 companies. We’ve found these companies, and they’ve found us, through every imaginable channel — former colleagues from our operating experience, cold inbounds, cold outbounds, founder to founder introductions, fellow angel investor introductions and institutional investor introductions. Almost 40% of these companies have a female founder or CEO, and they represent a broad range of verticals from consumer to enterprise to aerospace to transportation to healthcare.
We are backing winners. We are seeing companies in our portfolio attract investment from the best investors in the industry. In fact, our portfolio companies have collectively raised over $3B in venture funding and one of our first investments, Shape Security, just filed to go public. Bird recently raised more than $300M at a more than $2.5B valuation. Coinbase continues to dominate crypto and has raised at an $8B valuation. Carta has huge aspirations to disrupt private financial markets with their recent $1.7B valuation round. Airtable also recently achieved unicorn status with their $1.1B valuation. These are just a few growth-stage examples of companies in our portfolio. We have numerous other companies that have seen great traction and markups since our investment such as Brightwheel, Cameo, Carrot, Gusto, Literati, Lovevery, Modern Fertility, NurX and Winnie.
We have helped founders with some of the biggest challenges they face in pivotal moments of company-building. From finding co-founders to making key hires and customer introductions to positioning a company to raise their next round of funding, we’ve been gratified to have our founders trust us enough to call us for help at critical junctures. Working with founders was the main reason why we founded #ANGELS — we love to build companies. We hope our collective years of operating experience is something founders can draw and learn from.
We’re hitting milestones on our broader mission: to get more women on the cap tables of successful startups. The biggest highlight of our work here is in unveiling The Gap Table and partnering with Carta to prove what we’ve always known — that measuring the number of people inside a company is an oversimplified way to track inclusion. In what we believe to be the first-ever large-scale study of the equity gap, we and Carta found that women hold $0.43 in equity for every $1.00 their male peers do.
Until we measure and make progress on closing the equity gap, the cycle of women being underpaid, underfunded, and under-represented at the tables that matter most will continue. So we will continue to be noisy about this topic, share what we know, and celebrate the instances where we hear that women, and oftentimes the founders who hire them, have relied upon the Gap Table to inform compensation negotiations.
Reflecting on what we’ve accomplished and learned these first five years, we have come to realize that our shared experience of operating together at Twitter forged a bond that has allowed us to keep the #ANGELS fire going and growing through a lot of change: two new roles in venture, three C-level promotions, two weddings, five babies (and another on the way), two puppies and, to reinforce a stereotype we’ve spent our entire careers trying to break, a parenting-focused seed-stage start-up (more on that from Chloe Sladden)! Strong networks like the one we have among the six of us are secret weapons in life and in business.
What’s Next?
We are constantly on the hunt for the next great founding team and their vision for products and markets that positively impact our futures. We also will continue to help our portfolio of companies as they continue to pursue their dreams and appreciate the privilege of joining their journeys.
To the founders who have given us the opportunity to be a part of their story, thank you. On to the next 120!
