Investment Thesis: Strategy, Sectors & Scaling

Investment Thesis: Overview

• An investment thesis defines your focus areas and boundaries for investing.
  
• It helps investors filter out noise, concentrate efforts, and improve success rates.
  
• A basic investment thesis can be framed as a Venn diagram of three elements:
  
  • Sector/Domain: Industries or verticals you focus on
    
  • Geography: Where you invest
    
  • Stage: The maturity of the startups you back
    

What Drives Investment Decisions?

Sector/Domain

• Familiarity: Invest in sectors you understand from work, education, or experience.
  
• Affinity: Personal values or experiences may influence sector focus (e.g., legal tech).
  
• Interest: Past success in a sector (e.g., crypto) can shape future interest.
  

Geography

• Early-stage investing is often highly localised.
  
• Most angel investors focus on their immediate region (city/state/country).
  
• Cross-border investing may occur when there’s a personal or cultural connection (e.g., diaspora ties).
  

Stage

• Dictated by check size:
  
  • Pre-seed to Seed: 4–5 figure checks
    
  • Seed to Series A: Up to 6-figure checks
    
  • Series A & beyond: Requires $250K+ to multimillion-dollar checks
    
• Investing through syndicates or VC funds can give access to later-stage deals without needing large checks.
  

AngelSchool.vc Investment Thesis

Sector

• Focus on B2B technology and software.
  
  • Software enables fast iteration and traction.
    
  • Avoids hardware complexity and high upfront costs.
    
  • Fewer long-term dilution risks due to digital scalability.
    

Geography

• Global focus: US, Europe, and Asia.
  
  • 1300 investors split into regional clusters.
    
  • US cluster is most active; Europe and Asia clusters are growing.
    

Stage

• Primarily invest in Seed to Series A.
  
  • Occasionally pre-seed with traction.
    
  • Typical cheque size: $100K (pre-seed) to $1M+ (Series A).
    

Strategy: Grow investor network to increase cheque size and access later stages (Series B/C).