We are 10x Value Partners, a five-person investment firm with experience from Global Founders Capital, Rocket Internet, and other leading investment firms. We typically do 10-20 investments per year ranging from $100-300k (with c. 10% of this coming from the team). We invest early stage, but typically post-revenue and are sector and geo-agnostic.

10x Value Partners is run by Christian Schroeder, a German serial entrepreneur who has co-founded 10+ companies that have jointly raised $200m in funding. Since starting his own investment firm 2018, he achieved a 35x MOIC and >200% IRR on his private investment portfolio. Aside from syndicates, 10x VP only manages its team’s money.

Feel free to read more about how to succeed in Angel Investing here: https://schroederca.medium.com/the-ultimate-case-for-angel-investing-58f38c8d7cb7

Thesis

Our investment strategy is fundamentally driven by selecting opportunities that can provide an attractive investment return while simultaneously having decent downside protection. We don’t like losing money.

Target Companies

• We are sector-agnostic with a focus on pre-seed and early-stage deals.
• We value profitability more than growth, as it lowers risk.
• Hence, we put a special emphasis on unit economics and monetization potential.
• Our ideal target company is growing 5-10% month over month without losing too much money. With our investment, we accelerate the growth rate.
• Often, we follow a contrarian approach in selecting investment opportunities as it allows us to identify strong deals other investors may have overlooked.
• Ideally, we can add unfair advantage and move the needle, lowering the risk and increasing the success potential of the target company.

Risk Mitigation Measures

Contrary to typical VCs, we focus much more on risk management across four dimensions. This is related to the fact that we invest our own, hard-earned money and we don’t like losing it. In each deal we do, we seek to remove one or more risk components from the equation.

1) Founder Risk

We eliminate founder risk by investing in trusted founders that we have known for years either personally or professionally.

2) Market Risk

We eliminate market risk by investing in companies that have reached profitability or at least profitable unit economics (Yes, these do exist).

3) Execution Risk

We limit execution risk by offering extensive coaching to our founders.

4) Funding Risk

We limit funding risk by co-investing with deep-pocketed, reputable investors.

In all our deals, at least 1) or 2) should be a given. This means we reject >95% of investment proposals because we don’t know the founder AND they don’t have sufficient traction. Generally, this strategy allows us to be sector and stage agnostic while driving superior returns.

Aside from this, we put a very heavy emphasis on strong due diligence, spending between 20-100 hours on each deal and creating detailed memos. We have often been told by our LPs that we do the best due diligence out of all syndicates on AngelList.

Deal Flow

We capitalize on a strong network and multiple sourcing channels, seeing >50 deals per month. We do only conduct calls with the top 10-20% of companies that we get through our inbound and outbound channels and perform with the top 5% a deep due diligence after the calls. Subsequently, our investment process leads to ~ 1-2 investments per month.

Companies Christian Schroeder has co-founded (Selection)

HYGH (2019): HYGH is a marketplace for Digital OOH advertising. Since its foundation, the company managed to scale to US$ >10m ARR and raised a total funding amount of >US$ 30m.

Bullfinch (2020): Bullfinch is a Green FinTech providing funding to players in the decentralized energy transition. The company raised a total funding amount of US$ 10m.

Collective Ace Group (2021): Collective Ace is a roll-up for gaming service companies and gaming assets. The company raised US$ 5.5m in seed funding.

United Star Group (2022): United Star is a roll-up of software development companies and secured a commitment of US$ 65m from a Miami-based investment group.

Not all deals can be syndicated. It will depend on various circumstances, for example whether the founder agrees to syndication.