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Susan | Angel Investor

I backed 13 ‘unicorns’ at pre-seed and seed. Writing for angels who want better returns and for startup founders who want their attention.

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The Number Founders Think Is Optional But Investors Treat As The Whole Decision.

Founders raise on story. Investors quietly reduce the entire pitch to one proof point they almost never say out loud.

Five Signals I'm Reading While You're Still Talking

Angel investing is more about pattern-matching than data, but what it pattern-matching, and how do you win?

There Is No Ideal Founding Team. Here Is What Angel Investors Actually Want.

Somewhere in every accelerator there is a slide explaining that a startup needs a hacker, a hustler, and a hipster, a formulation that sounds like a sandwich order and predicts roughly as much.

The $400M Valuation That Cost the Founder Half the Company

It turns out you can lose your unicorn status. More than 220 companies discovered this year, having assumed a billion-dollar valuation was theirs to keep.

AI's Phantom ARR

Why the recurring revenue in your AI business does not recur, and the one number that tells you before the cap table does

The $60M Exit Where the Founder Took Home $275,000

A liquidation preference teardown, line by line, on the deal that looked like the win of the year and what you need to do to avoid the same fate.

The Pre-Payment Protocol: What I Check Before I Wire a Cent

The diligence sequence I run on every deal before I will even agree to a conversation. Run those seven checks against your own pitch now.

Inside a $25k Angel Check: One Clause That Quietly Costs Founders 6x the Money.

This is what that one paragraph can do to a $1.5M raise. I am going to walk it forward, stage by stage, with and without the clause.

Take a Seat. The Diagnosis Won't Take Long.

7 questions from my paid subscribers this quarter. Every one told me exactly where they were about to go wrong.

Inside a $2M seed term sheet I just closed and the three clauses that would have cost the founders $4M at exit.

What each one does, what it costs you, and how to push back. Open this next to your own term sheet.