Zap's Wrap November 25th

hi friends,

Writing you this note from Joao Passoa, Brazil, more on that later (:

First of all, just made angel investment #12!

Fifr is building a flat-fee financial wellness platform. Cofounders Daniel and Brendan both live in Nashville! I’m so excited because:

• First startup where I was a customer before investor. As a customer, I love it because:

  • Instead of charging an AUM fee like most financial advisors, Fifr charges a flat fee. If I put the same amount into my safe investments as I do each year now, I would spend over $1 million in fees over my lifetime, which is insane. With Fifr, that number looks like $50k.

  • They are tech driven. I like being able to DM whenever I need anything. I like the software and how easy it is for me to use.

  • They have a different perspective on my portfolio. Since they don’t charge AUM, I feel like they have a no-bias perspective.

• I love their mission- save their customers $1 trillion dollars.

• Big fan of the founding story. The cofounders have known each other for years. They are obsessed with solving this problem.

• I like founders with skin in the game and these guys have put a lot of their personal capital to build what they believe in.

Highly suggest testing it out and it’s free to try ‘til the end of the year. Try it here.

Startup stuff that’s cool:

• I met Jeff, founder of HeartVue AI. They’re using AI on cardiac MRI analysis to automate image interpretation, reporting, and billing.

• You will soon be able to buy Butt Napkins at 300 Dick’s locations. This is the brainchild of Ryan and I think it’s hilarious!

• I just wrapped up with the quarterly InRev investor call. This is my only portfolio company that schedules these calls and honestly I think it’s genius. Most of their investors came and they all really, really want to be helpful where they can. It’s probably easier to do these calls when things are up and to the right (like InRev right now), but I think that having a regular cadence of these would be most important when a startup is struggling. I think more early stage companies should try this method out.

• Spent most of the week getting an SPV spinning. I’m very excited to do the first one and hopefully more to come because I see 2 big problems for angel investors in Nashville:

  • 1) I see angels only invest in first-check-in angel rounds (because that’s the deal flow they receive). More often than not the companies don’t scale or raise institutional capital. When they need more capital, they rely on the angels to re-up. Now, I don’t believe VC funding is at all necessary to build a great company, BUT having at least 1 other large, professional check writer significantly derisks a business because the founder isn’t reliant on exclusively the angels for more capital. → I’m focusing the SPVs on following institutional investors.

  • 2) I see angels invest 25-50k in maybe 3-4 deals. Then, they all fail and they spent a lot of money and never invest again ): I just think most people should write a check size that allows them to make a minimum of 10 investments, more is always better! → I want an SPV to enable people to write small checks, ideally lots of them into startups.

Personal stuff:

I have been in Brazil for the past week. No, I am not on vacation (yet). It has been work, work, and more work!!!

For some context, my boyfriend has a startup and employs 7 engineers down here. So he is spending all of his time getting much needed face time with them in the office.

For me, I am business partners with 3 of the engineers on a recruiting company called Alvorada (website coming soon). We help other startups hire Brazilian engineers and it’s been super rewarding.

We’re in Joao Passoa, a beach town that is the most Eastern tip of the Americas. Our company is called Alvorada because that means ‘dawn’ in Portuguese.

Some thoughts on Brazil/engineers:

• The engineers here are extremely hard working and dedicated. They are proud to work for an American company, so they want to prove their abilities. Being a software engineer for an American company is one of the highest salaried positions. Many of the engineers might have grown up in poverty and saw this as an opportunity to change their family’s situation. Many use the salary not only for themselves, but take care of their entire family with it.

• I’m super big into travel, but I’ve never been somewhere where I haven’t found a single other American and really only the engineering team speaks English. Where I’m staying is industrialized and very nice, but it feels so foreign because I don’t understand anything LOL.

• The vibe of this city reminds me of Nashville in the sense that it is rapidly changing. You can see brand new, luxury buildings next to old, rundown ones. There is a lot of construction happening and a strong entrepreneurial vibe. People have an attitude that they will figure things out.

• They are super high tech in some ways. We had to come down here to officially get our CPF numbers, which is like their taxpayer registry. It was incredibly fast to do and now we really have that information on an app to sign documents even when we are in the US.

• In other ways, they feel way less industrialized. One thing that has blown me away, every building is responsible for their own sidewalk. So when you walk down the street, you will have one building with manicured landscaping and sidewalk and then the next will just be a dirt path. Back and forth and back and forth.

Of course we had some fun, the entire team rented buggies and we drove to see the beaches and canyons all around the city!

I ended up getting sick the past few days, but I am almost better (:

to the moon,

zap