Angel Portfolio Playbook: What Failures and One Exit Taught Me
I had been a founder for over 15 years and in 2019, I felt like I wanted to take the leap into the startup investing side. Inspired by Jason Calacanis's book "Angel," I wrote my first check to a game studio founded by former Next Games colleagues of mine. After starting with small $5K investments, I eventually created an angel syndicate with 200+ gaming professionals before launching F4 Fund in 2024. Between 2019-2023, I made 34 angel investments. Note that I’ve stopped doing new angel investments after we started F4 Fund. Currently, in March 2025, the portfolio looks something like this. 1 exit (returned more than 1x of total invested capital) 4 companies doing extremely well, 4 that struggled but are now growing 16 with markups of 30-300% 7 gone to $0 (plus 4 more likely in 2024) 2 survived […]