How should angel investors add value to the companies they back?

Harry Stebbings · Sep 18, 2023

The best founders don't need their investors

23:37 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate

Roger Ehrenberg · Feb 19, 2024

The best founders are not dependent on their VCs but do benefit from good ones as a sounding board and source of empathy and psychological support in the earliest days

In the best companies he's been involved with, the founders were self-motivated and refused to lean on investors as a crutch, yet every one of them benefited from having stable partners to process hard feelings and hard business problems while searching for product-market fit

Scope: value concentrated in the earliest, pre-product-market-fit days

65:16 20VC: Why VC Returns Will Get Worse, Why LP Incentive Structures are so Broken, What is the Answer to Liquidity with No M&A or IPOs, When to Sell vs Hold Your Winners & Turning $5M into $250M with The Trade Desk | Roger Ehrenberg, Eberg Capital

Harry Stebbings · Jun 17, 2024

Your best companies don't need you, so investors shouldn't spend time on them

Scope: posed to Danny as a challenge

52:26 20VC: Index's Danny Rimer on Investing Lessons from Hits like Figma, Discord and Etsy to Missing Snapchat, Airbnb, Facebook & Spotify | Why Valuation is a Trap and Market Sizing, Signalling and Sector/Geo-Specific Funds are all Noise

Harry Stebbings · Oct 25, 2024

The best founders don't need their investors; roughly 90% of VCs don't add value, so the right offer is capital, network, support, and staying out of the way

Founders mostly want money and non-interference from investors

Scope: presented as his own school of thought; says he tries to be no different from the 90%

8:59 20VC: The Truth About Multi-Stage Firms; Why Portfolio Services are for VCs not Founders | Why Politics is Rife & Decision-Making is Broken in Large VCs | Why Reserves are Bad for Founders & How Boutique Firms Will Win with Mark Goldberg @ Chemistry

Harry Stebbings · Mar 10, 2025

The best founders don't need their investors; they are made better by them but not dependent on them

9:15 20VC: Lessons from Investing $2BN and Returning $8BN in Cash | Why Most Venture Partnerships are Broken | We Sold Salesforce Early and Lost Out on Billions | Are The Best Deals Always Expensive and Competitive with Jake Saper @ Emergence Capital

Harry Stebbings · Apr 14, 2025

The best founders don't need their investors

48:28 20VC: Benchmark's Victor Lazarte on Why Portfolio Construction is BS| Why SaaS Spreadsheet Investing is Dead | Why China is a Stabilising Force for the US | Three Traits All the Best Founders Have & The Lie All Big Tech Companies Have Been Telling

Taavet Hinrikus · Apr 28, 2025

The best founders fundamentally don't need VC help; the right investor model is to be deeply involved when needed and get out of the way the rest of the time

36:59 20VC: VCs are Spreadsheet Monkeys and are Commoditised | Why Fees and Carry Misalign GPs and LPs | Why Founders Will Realise Multi-Stage Funds Damage Seed Rounds | Why We Need European Sovereignty More Than Ever with Taavet Hinrikus

Immad Akhund · May 12, 2025

The right investor role is an on-call operator: founders don't need you, but an active entrepreneur can answer specific operational questions when they arise

He had seven or eight unicorn founders invest in Mercury whom he didn't need, but he texted them for one-off questions like hiring a CFO or Series B multiples

8:09 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund

Tom Blomfield · May 13, 2024

Eileen Burbidge was head and shoulders the most helpful investor he has worked with

She went far beyond economic self-interest — offering him her house, cooking him meals, and putting her portfolio aside to work four days a week for six months as an exec at Monzo when they lost their chief people officer

Scope: notes she was also economically incentivised as Monzo was her biggest position

55:38 20VC: Behind the Scenes at Y Combinator: The Interview Process | What the Best & Worst Do in the Program | Do the Best All Raise Pre-Demo Day & YC's Fundraising Advice to Startups | Why the Value is in Application Layer AI with Tom Blomfield

Gokul Rajaram · Mar 16, 2026

There is no such thing as proprietary founder access — what is actually proprietary is your ability to add value

If you're just capital assuming founders will come to you, you won't win; investors must hone a specific differentiated offer, whether counsel, distribution, customer networks or hiring

52:39 20VC: The 8 Moats of Enduring Software Companies: How to Analyse for Durability and Defensibility in a World of AI | Why Dropouts are "AI Maxing" the World & Remote Early-Stage Companies are Dying with Gokul Rajaram

Carles Reina · Apr 11, 2026

Angel investors should compete on helpfulness, not capital, because a small check is never what makes or breaks a company

A 5k, 10k or 50k check doesn't make or break a company, so the investor must be clear that money isn't their value-add

72:42 20Sales: ElevenLabs: Why We Set a 20x Sales Quota | How to Structure Sales Compensation Plans | Customer Success: 'Total BS' or Growth Engine? | Building an AI Sales Machine: What Tools & Tactics Must CROs Adopt Today with Carles Reina

Josh Browder · May 18, 2026

Taking 5-7% ownership is justified because he returns more than that in value to the founder over the company's life

Through founder tactics, 2am help, and assistance even raising their Series C, he saves them more than the equity is worth — and he isn't asking for 25%

Scope: holds even against top-tier alternative investors

55:56 20VC: Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio | The One Man Accelerator at The Four Seasons | Why VCs Can Be Sharks and What Founders Need to Know | Why Stocks and Cash are BS and You Should Invest in Land with Josh Browder

Harry Stebbings · Oct 2, 2023

An investor's job is to offer founders a catalog of amazing operators who can help, on the awareness that the investor themselves probably can't.

Self-awareness that he is unlikely to be able to help founders directly is what drove building operator networks like 20 Product, 20 Sales and 20 Growth.

27:18 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP

Tom Hulme · Apr 10, 2025

Bringing experienced founders from the investor's network into new investments delivers unbelievable value as mentoring

Those people combine hard-won experience with a pay-it-forward motivation

57:39 20VC: How to Fix the UK Tech Ecosystem | Why We Need to Flood the UK with Venture Capital | What the UK Can Learn From Sequoia, Stripe and Norway | Why Now is the Time to be Bullish on China & Lessons from Jensen Huang with Tom Hulme & Stan Boland

Mitchell Green · Mar 7, 2026

The best thing investors can do is connect founders with operators who have already built what the founder is building and help them recruit, then get out of the way

That is why Sequoia, Benchmark and Index are great — people want to work for their portfolio companies

38:25 20VC: Why the SaaS Apocalypse is BS | Why China Will Win the AI War | Why 50% of VCs Should Not Exist and are Tourists | Why Stock-Based Comp is the Hidden Sin of the Valley with Mitchell Green, Lead Edge Capital

Sebastian Siemiatkowski · Mar 1, 2021

Once an investor has established that a founder has the ambition, capacity and drive to improve, giving them total trust and pure support is the best possible way to back them

That is what Moritz did for him and it is the right model for supporting a founder who meets those criteria

Scope: conditional on the investor having first assessed the founder's ambition, intent and capacity

31:24 20VC: Klarna Founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski on Scaling Europe's Most Valuable Private Tech Company, How To Motivate and Challenge Your Team Most Effectively & The Biggest Lessons From Working with Mike Moritz

Akin Babayigit · Jun 26, 2023

The biggest value a VC can add is being there in the bad times and a friend in the good times, offering support when asked rather than pushing it on founders

What matters years in is whether the founder feels comfortable raising things like secondaries or acquisitions with you; the best founders know what they need

58:50 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios

Oren Zeev · Feb 2, 2026

Founders are receptive to investor advice when the investor never forces it and pre-commits to supporting the founder's decision regardless

If a founder knows they don't have to convince you and that you'll back them even if you disagree, it disarms them and creates a safe environment like a psychotherapist's; otherwise they spend the conversation overcoming your objections rather than listening

Scope: speaking only to his own experience with founders he backs

48:11 20VC: 50% of Funds Will Go Out of Business | Why Growth Expectations Today are BS and Will Not Last | Why Oren Zeev Takes $0 Management Fees But 30% Carry | Why GPs Should Not Tell LPs Their Strategy

Tom Blomfield · May 13, 2024

The hardest part of being a YC partner is accepting you are a coach, not in the driving seat — founders can take or ignore your advice

18:52 20VC: Behind the Scenes at Y Combinator: The Interview Process | What the Best & Worst Do in the Program | Do the Best All Raise Pre-Demo Day & YC's Fundraising Advice to Startups | Why the Value is in Application Layer AI with Tom Blomfield

Nabeel Hyatt · Apr 4, 2025

The right role with both founders and one's children is consigliere: talk the decision through exhaustively but leave the choice to them

He doesn't know what the truth is, so he can't tell them what's right or wrong — they have to walk their own path, which doesn't preclude discussing it exhaustively

64:55 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital

Immad Akhund · May 12, 2025

Founder-turned-investors must suppress their own ego and ideas rather than pushing their preferred direction onto founders they back

Operators are used to having their own ideas, and young founders will agree just to win the check even though it isn't their idea; it isn't fair to push an idea on someone else and you're along for their journey, not a major part of it

Scope: applies especially to active entrepreneurs who become investors

5:24 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund

Matan Bar · Feb 11, 2021

Founders should take board advice on areas where they lack experience — scaling teams, which leaders and CFO to hire and when — and expect little useful input on areas of founder strength like product

The three founders are product- and design-oriented with their own resources to consult, whereas investors have seen many companies make hiring and scaling mistakes, so their feedback there is priceless

Scope: depends on the founding team's background; only holds if you have good investors whose feedback is accurate

24:30 20VC: Scaling to a $1.3Bn Valuation While in Stealth, The Power of Different Network Effects Within Payment Platforms & How To Leverage Your Board and Investor Base for the Most Value with Matan Bar, Founder & CEO @ Melio

Josh Browder · May 18, 2026

Investors should never tell entrepreneurs what to build, because unless the idea comes from the founder it is not their life's work

His own imagination running wild about what a company could become was his biggest investing mistake; ownership of the idea is what sustains a founder

Scope: he will help with everything other than product and customers

44:35 20VC: Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio | The One Man Accelerator at The Four Seasons | Why VCs Can Be Sharks and What Founders Need to Know | Why Stocks and Cash are BS and You Should Invest in Land with Josh Browder

Miles Grimshaw · Sep 18, 2023

The best founders would succeed without an investing partner, but a deeply committed trusted partner can still supercharge them

You can't coach height — the capability has to be there — but even Jeff Bezos kept a board and partners with him the entire journey

23:47 Best founders would succeed alone but a trusted partner can still supercharge them

Ophelia Brown · Mar 17, 2023

Investing and helping build are distinct activities, so operating networks that support functional leaders like CMOs and CEOs matter more than angel networks

Angels have their place but writing cheques isn't the same as enabling operators to succeed

34:02 Operator networks supporting functional leaders matter more than angel networks for value add

Carles Reina · Apr 11, 2026

Go-to-market and sales hiring are the number one way an angel can help portfolio companies

He joins customer calls, does interviews for them, reviews their decks and pitch recordings, which lets him diagnose market fit and traction

72:59 Gtm and sales hiring is the highest leverage help

Sahil Bloom · Feb 25, 2022

An audience of ordinary people is far more valuable to portfolio companies than the VC-insider audiences most firms' content efforts produce, because the former are actual potential customers

Associates told to build audiences end up followed by other venture associates who just like each other's posts, so sharing a portfolio company reaches only that closed ecosystem

14:45 Consumer audience reaches real customers not vc insiders

Phin Barnes · Oct 2, 2023 · speculative

If operator networks work, the operators will convert relationships into equity-compensated advisory or investing roles, capturing the most valuable asset in the startup ecosystem.

Founders return to operators whose advice was impactful, a relationship forms, and that operator earns their way onto a locked cap table through expertise rather than capital.

27:30 Successful operator networks convert into equity compensated advisory and investing roles for operators

Kulveer Taggar · May 31, 2019

The most valuable trait in an investor is the ability to reach conviction quickly and independently of trends or what other VCs are doing

Investors who back what they believe can change the world and then act fast are decisive at critical moments, as Garry Tan was for Instacart, Coinbase and Zeus

11:01 Fast independent conviction is the real value

Kyle Harrison · Oct 21, 2022

Investors should do proactive work for founders rather than passively offering to help ('let me know how I can be helpful')

Doing the work first and then asking the founder to redirect you is more useful than passive availability; he rejects the memeification of venture

5:54 Do proactive work first rather than wait to be asked for help

Daniel Erickson · Jun 5, 2020

The most valuable non-capital contribution an investor can make depends on the company, and for a product-focused technical team it is go-to-market help: marketing and sales advice and introductions within the portfolio

Investors should augment the skills the founding team lacks rather than duplicate its strengths

23:53 Complement the founding teams skill gaps

Mike Mignano · Jul 6, 2026

Nothing in venture matters more than an investor's relationship with founders

Founders are lonely and being someone they trust is the best help you can give; and selfishly, reputation is everything in venture and only comes from great founder relationships

61:46 Trusted founder relationship outranks every other form of help

Akin Babayigit · Jun 26, 2023

The right VC posture is to offer founders a buffet of optional support they can tap into rather than to claim value add, and founders should partner with investors because they are smart, decent, and will be around a long time

Occasional help like an introduction is real, but it is not what an investor should be selling themselves on

60:11 Offer a buffet of optional support not claimed value add

Chris Dixon · Mar 27, 2024

The best founders don't need their investors for product and technology ideas, but they do need them for network — customer prospects, executive talent, fundraising and partners

A deep technical or product founder could not plausibly have spent their time building the right relationships at every Fortune 500 company or across the investor and talent landscape

15:41 Best founders need investor network connections not product or technology advice

David Schneider · Sep 11, 2024

The view that the best founders don't need help is probably a sign the investor doesn't know how to help; every founder benefits from an honest friend, and investors should be founder helpful rather than merely founder friendly

Everyone in life can use a friend to talk to and an honest conversation; being in the founder's camp means also telling them hard truths and preparing them for what's coming — while coaching and mentoring rather than doing the job for them, like a grandparent versus a parent

35:13 Founders not needing help reflects investor limitation not founder independence

Danny Rimer · Jun 17, 2024

It is worth spending time on your best companies even though they don't need you, because your contribution can add another multiple

Turning a certain 10x into a 12x or 14x is well worth the time

52:31 Spending time on certain winners still multiplies returns

Jake Saper · Mar 10, 2025

Founders choose a VC because they believe that VC will bend the odds of success in their favor, and even incremental help matters enormously

The base odds of startup success are so low that any incremental improvement is significant, and a firm needs some reason to be chosen

9:33 Incremental help still matters enormously given low base odds of success