Why I angel invest
After 6 years of operating at high growth startups, I found a new passion in helping founders as an angel investor.
Hi! I’m Andrea, currently Growth Product Lead at Amplitude, and I started angel investing in pre-seed and seed stage consumer and enterprise startups about a year ago. I want to share more about why I became an angel investor and my investment thesis. And if this resonates with you, I’d love to hear from anyone who might be interested in partnering or just getting to know each other.
My journey to angel investing
I grew up in Shanghai, China, and came to the U.S. for college. I was a top student in math and science growing up, but meeting an extremely eclectic Chinese artist, Bingyi Huang, during high school changed my life and career. A modern renaissance woman, she opened my eyes to the world of art and showed me that you don’t have to be defined by a single identity in life and career.
Determined to learn more about art, I came to Stanford to initially major in art history and was obsessed with Johannes Vermeer, a 17th-century Dutch painter most famous for his ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring'.
I love Vermeer because he liked to depict ordinary people, like milkmaids, and elevated them to look like royalty through his artistry, whereas other Dutch painters like Rembrandt in the same era only painted royalty on commission. That focus on discovering beauty and potential in ordinary people really drew me to Vermeer, which is why I spent 2.5 years as an art history scholar at Stanford and Oxford, chased down and studied every single one of Vermeer’s existing paintings around the world.
Needless to say, I didn’t feel I fit in at Stanford, when I was one of the very few pursuing art history and everyone else was studying CS and exploring careers in tech. But I was entrepreneurial in a different way: within a month after I arrived on campus as a freshman, I started a bilingual Chinese/English e-magazine focused on sharing remarkable narratives of people from all walks of life and quickly established chapters in 4 universities around the world. I also co-founded a cohort-based summer incubator, Lizard Institute, to nurture and develop high-potential future leaders of China across sectors and have been running that for the last 10 years.
But my interest in tech grew every year I spent in Silicon Valley, and even in non-tech roles I explored. As a management consultant, I was the “Chinese tech expert” who used my knowledge of tech trends in China to advise the chief executives of a leading U.S. bank on how they should innovate on financial service products. And joining the Lime team pre-launch and helping to launch the micromobility industry in the U.S. made me realize how much I enjoyed category creation and making it a reality.
I have been deep in operating in the last 6 years, and I saw firsthand how difficult and rewarding it is to scale a company from early stage to public. At Lime (series A to D), I helped the co-founders craft the story for Series B fundraising, secured the first city contracts, and later on, drove rapid international expansion on the product team. At Amplitude, I helped build and scale the product growth team, driving product-led growth from Series D to a direct listing and beyond.
Over the years, I have developed deep empathy and respect for founders and want to help more going through the entrepreneurial journey. They have taken a chance on me in the past, they are some of my best friends, and I want to be there for them since the very beginning.
Early stage (0-1) is my favorite stage of investing because it’s all about discovering potential before anyone else sees it. I love partnering with product-minded founders long before they need funding, be a sounding board and be a long-term partner through thick and thin.
My Investment Theses
As an angel investor, I invest in pre-seed, seed, and series A startups in consumer and enterprise. I like to identify and work for product minded founders working on category creating ideas, across verticals. And I help founders with fundraising, hiring (product, engineering, design, growth), product, growth strategy, scaling, and more.
In consumer, I am excited about how we shop, entertain, and make a living. I like to think about how consumer trends in the east might manifest in the west (also why I was interested in working at Lime).
In enterprise, I am bullish on companies born out of former operators who experienced pain that could be solved by technology, across infrastructure and applications. And I look for teams that have unique insights, are focused on solving end-user pain and are relentlessly customer-obsessed. I look pretty broadly across SaaS (horizontal and vertical), infrastructure (data), and am very excited how AI/ML will transform how we work.
But regardless of vertical, I love to partner with founders who are learning animals and have the ambition, grit and vision to create new categories that don’t exist yet.
How to partner
I’m actively angel investing and always on the lookout for founders I want to be a partner to in the next 10+ years. If you are a founder working on new ideas, even if you do not need funding now, I want to hear from you, be a sounding board, and discuss how I can help.
If you are a fellow angel investor or an institutional investor, I’d love to meet you and partner in future investments.
How to get in touch with me:
Email: andrea.shuyu.wang1@gmail.com
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