📣 Announcement: You’re invited to a Venture Bite with us and Eric Bahn

Eric Bahn once helped a startup by assembling their IKEA furniture. (That's not a metaphor).

He invested in Webflow when it was barely a blip. Instead of writing a check and walking away, he ran persona exercises, reviewed product roadmaps, and showed up to their first office with an Allen key.

Webflow is now worth North of $4 billion.

This Thursday, Eric’s spilling the tea on advisory shares and how small checks can create outsized impact. If you've ever wondered whether your check is too small to matter, you’ll want to be there.

📰 Today's topic: How to evaluate a founder when there's nothing to evaluate

You're sitting across from a founder: 

Pre-seed round. No revenue. No retention metrics. Nothing.

At this stage, you're not evaluating the company. You're evaluating the founder's brain. 

And two questions will help you sort signal from noise pretty quickly.

Question 1: Who is your customer?

This sounds basic. It's not.

Most founders fumble this badly - they'll say something like, "Our ICP are women ages 20-45." But that's not a customer persona...that's a census checkbox.

A good answer: "Women ages 20-45 who work in banking, make six figures, and have no time.”

A great answer: "A woman that works in banking, eats lunch at her desk, makes six figures, reads Benzinga for fun, uses apps A, B, and C, and currently solves this problem by doing D, E, and F."

The great answer describes a real person. Someone the founder could play in a musical. (Seriously). 

The best founders become besties with their potential customers. They know everything about them and even invite them to Thanksgiving dinner.

Question 2: How will you find your first customers?

Now, you're not asking them to predict which channels will scale. 

You're asking whether they've thought about it, and ideally, tried something.

A good answer: "I'll send referral codes to people in this zip code because I gave out 10 at the train station and they worked." 

A great answer: "I'm already acquiring customers. Spent $20 so far, drove 40 people to our waitlist through direct mail. Converts at 20%."

Will those economics hold at scale? (Probably not, as costs almost always go up.)

But the point is: this founder is already running experiments and measuring results.

What this means for your next deal

At Hustle Fund, the best founders we’ve backed have all been incredibly metrics-driven. 

Not just at Series B, but from Day 1.

That means understanding how much it costs for someone to learn about you, how much it costs to convert them, and how much you make on them over time.

As an angel, THAT should be far more important to you than TAM slides and five-year projections. 

And, also pay attention to whether they know their numbers. Not perfect spreadsheets, just a general awareness of how money moves through their business.

Founders who nail this are ahead of 99% of the decks we see. 

Those are the bets worth making.

– Brian from Angel Squad

🪽 Angel Investors Come from Everywhere

Spoiler alert: You don't need to be in Silicon Valley or have a trust fund to be a great angel investor.

Nancy Zheng | Bay Area, California

Big Tech Eng Director → Voice AI Founder → Consumer Angel Investor

10+ years at Google (Wearables & Voice) and Stripe. Now building Gensona - AI interactive voice experiences that run on edge devices, targeting the wearables of the future.

Why this matters: For the first time in a decade, Nancy believes the consumer window is open again, and there will be massive winners. She's laser-focused on two bets: voice interfaces and memory/personalization.

She worked on products like Google Glass and believes AI Wearables like the Meta Rayban Displays will be ubiquitous in 5 years. She invests in high-taste, voice-first consumer companies that can stand out in an age of AI slop.

Nancy is in our angel investing community, Angel Squad. Small Bets subscribers can grab a 30 day guest pass to join them.

Overheard in SF…probably

“We're doing the Theranos model minus the fraud. So basically just turtlenecks and vague promises about 'changing healthcare.”