Throughout the last decade I have reviewed thousands of early stage tech companies, and invested in the seed round of Intercom, Linear, and Deel amongst many others. I'm looking for a few simple things when considering investing in an early stage company. Team > Market Size > Traction > VC/Expert Signals. Primarily I focus on leveraging my network and experience having met many successful founding teams to invest in the best founders of tomorrow.
I've been angel investing for the last 10 years in consumer tech startups throughout my roles at SV Angel, Airbnb and as a Sequoia Scout. At SV Angel I helped source and evaluate new companies and helped to connect our portfolio with corporate partners and follow on financing. During this time I worked on investments in Stripe, Pinterest, Kaggle, Hipmunk, ElaCarte amongst many others. In early 2012 I joined Airbnb where I held roles covering Business Development, Operations and Product Development over 6.5 years including starting and building Airbnb's first sector focused vertical, Airbnb for Business. In my last role I led Airbnb's R&D group, Samara, exploring numerous cutting edge industries.
After leaving Airbnb in 2018 I co-managed a Y Combinator focused micro-fund with Brad Flora where we've invested in 50 companies across 3 funds including investments in 3 Unicorns. Our seed investments were followed by many leading funds including A16Z, Founder's Fund, Tiger and Spark Capital. I also set up a consultancy supporting founders raising Series A/B/C rounds and have published content around this topic.
Nomad Capital will focus on finding SaaS tools built by incredible teams that can help the next generation of companies build better products, faster and more effectively. Having bought numerous software solutions into Airbnb, I feel well positioned to identify these opportunities and those teams who have an unfair advantage going after this sector. I will also look to invest in emerging marketplaces that have global scale potential.
I source deals from with my network and will have a heavy focus on Y Combinator startups.
