People often ask how I decide what companies to invest in, and where I get the conviction to actually put money in.

In thinking about it, most of my investments have come from decades of thoughts about a specific problem that a company is solving.

This is the story of how and why I believe The Browser Company (Arc) is the operating system for the future of the internet.

Here is some insight into the thousands of hours and deeply emotional personal experiences (erm, what…?) spanning the past decade, that ultimately led me to posting the tweet above.

July 2014 - It All Started With A Chromebook

I got my first Chromebook as a college graduation present from my mom back in 2014. She could immediately tell that she had made a mistake.

You could see the thoughts as if they were painted directly on my face (I couldn’t even pretend to hide it):

Where did this come from and… why?

She...

Shortly after learning more about the venture capital space and (making my first angel investment), I thought for sure that I’d want to start my own fund. I was practicing patience though. I just started my journey, so I’d have to be out of my mind to think I’ve earned the right to manage other people’s money. Patience is something that I am good at though: I am a long-term-focused person in everything I do. So all I have to do right now is focus on deriving happiness from my own angel investments.

Something strange started happening though. After making a few more investments and talking more publicly about angel investing (while continuing to learn). I started to get a lot of people asking me the following question:

When are you going to start your own fund? And when you do, can I invest?

Wait, what…? Now, we aren’t just talking about friends and family here… Let’s take the...

I get these questions a lot. Like a lot a lot. Questions that I also had when first researching the angel investment space. So here’s an aggregated list of top questions I’ve gotten since starting.

1. How do you decide to invest in early-stage startups, and how do you access opportunities in that space?
2. What are the investment minimums for early-stage angel investing?
3. Should I invest in a fund?
4. How do you know you’re signing an agreement that is “safe”? Do you have a lawyer review?
5. How do you transfer money to complete the investment?

1. How’d you decide to invest in early-stage startups, and how do you get access to opportunities in that space

Just to quickly explain what “early-stage investing” means, it can be anywhere from idea-phase (pre-product) all the way to pre-PMF (Product-Market Fit). This would usually be a Pre-seed/Seed/Series A (but you are usually getting closer to PMF...

Last Updated: 9/19/2022

I made my first ever investment back in 2013 (I was 21).

No, this wasn’t an angel investment. I bought a company on the NASDAQ that I loved. Research In Motion (though you may better know them as BlackBerry).

Why, might you ask? Well - I started my first business (CyberBytes Inc.) in June of 2010, and I thought having a BlackBerry made me a more legitimate business owner (back in high school), because, well, I could write emails more efficiently with the physical keyboard. Right?

I lost a lot of money from my first investment

By a lot, I mean the $4,000 investment turned into something like $2-3k

And hey, that was a lot of money for me back then - I only made $5-10k/yr for my first four years in business. But that’s a story for another day.

Even with the major losses on paper, that wasn’t enough to keep me away from starting the unofficially-official weekly...