🤝 This week’s edition is sponsored by Baker Tilly

Great investors invest. Baker Tilly handles the rest.

You're spotting great deals left and right but between LP reporting, fund accounting, and compliance deadlines, who has time to invest?

Baker Tilly is basically that one friend who enjoys it (quirky, but investors are grateful). They handle the back-office chaos — fund administration, valuations, cybersecurity, the works.

Translation? More time deploying capital, less time drowning in paperwork.

They've helped asset managers from $250M to $5B AUM run tighter, smarter operations. You focus on finding the next unicorn; they'll keep your fund humming behind the scenes.

Behind-the-scenes MVP? Yeah, that's Baker Tilly.

📰 Today's topic: What Happens If Your Best Bet Never IPOs?

The IPO you're dreaming about probably isn't coming. And that's not bad news.

When you put $5k into a seed-stage company, you're so early that going public is years and many rounds away, if it ever happens at all. Most of the real money flows back through two doors people rarely talk about: secondary sales and acquisitions.

The M&A door was basically welded shut for a long stretch. In 2026 it's swung back open, helped along by a friendlier government stance on dealmaking. So if your company gets bought, that's a real exit.

The other door is the secondary market. It's grown big enough that you can sell your position to another buyer well before any IPO. Funds, family offices, dedicated secondary shops - there's an actual ecosystem of people who want to buy early shares now.

Now, here’s the part that matters most when you have a winner…

Say your $5k runs up 100x on paper. Congratulations, it's "worth" half a million dollars. Except paper gains aren't money. They're a number in a spreadsheet until someone wires you cash.

This is where discipline is key. We've had a position run up over 100x. Instead of white-knuckling it and praying for a perfect exit someday, we started selling small slices through secondaries along the way. Take some money off the table after a big multiple, and let the rest keep riding.

Most angels treat every position as all-or-nothing, hold forever, hope for the moon. But trimming a piece at 20x or 30x doesn't mean you've stopped believing. It means you're banking a win you can spend while staying in the game.

Horizontal companies (broad tools anyone can spin up) tend to be more exposed to disruption than vertical ones in regulated corners like fintech or digital health, where licenses and messy workflow knowledge build a genuine moat.

So when you size up a deal, don't only ask "could this be huge?" Ask "if it is, how do I get my money out?" Map the realistic path before you wire the $5k. The exit you plan for shapes the bet you make.

– Brian from Angel Squad

📕 Startup term you should know

Ever heard of ROFR?

ROFR stands for Right of First Refusal. When a shareholder wants to sell their startup shares to an outside buyer, the company (and sometimes its existing investors) usually has the right to step in and buy those shares first, on the exact same terms. The outside buyer only gets the shares if the company passes.

My insider scoop: ROFR is the quiet gatekeeper of almost every secondary deal. A buyer and seller can agree on price, sign paperwork, and shake hands, but nothing is final until the ROFR window closes. Companies use this right to control who lands on their cap table, which is exactly why allocation in the hottest names is so hard to get. The shares are technically for sale, but the company decides whether you actually end up holding them.

The catch is that the ROFR window often runs 30 days or longer, so a secondary you thought was locked can evaporate if the company (or a favored insider) decides to match your offer. Smart angels treat a signed secondary as pending, not closed, until the right has either lapsed or been formally waived.

Overheard in SF…probably

“Our product roadmap is inspired by Elon's Full Self-Driving promises - perpetually 6 months away, indefinitely.”