Community wisdom #4
Anh-Tho Chuong: Optimizing for the right variables
Community Wisdom features intimate conversations with accomplished angel investors, distilling their most profound insights into focused stories. Every two weeks, we dive deep into one key lesson that shaped their investment journey.
Meet the investor
Anh-Tho Chuong brings a rare dual perspective to early-stage investing in Europe as both an active founder and angel investor. Her startup, Lago, is an SF-Paris based company tackling the complex world of usage-based billing for software companies. Founded in 2021, they've raised $22m from leading investors like FirstMark and YC across their Seed and Series A.
Her personal portfolio includes breakout successes like Hugging Face, which she backed during her business school days before AI was mainstream. Now, as a founder herself, she's experienced firsthand how the quality of investor relationships shapes a company's journey.
Where most angel investors go wrong
Angel investing is a long term game, no matter how you look at it. In long term games, the rules that govern success are meaningfully different from those in short term games.
If you're in a long term game but behave like you're in a short term one, you might reap some early benefits that support the idea that you're behaving accordingly. However, as time goes on, you'll start to see the cracks in your strategy emerge, and success will become harder to achieve.
You need to acknowledge which game you're playing, and optimize for the right variables.
In angel investing, numbers might seem like the right variable to focus on, and many do. In pursuit of portfolio construction, angels will focus their attention on portfolio size, diversity, valuations, check sizes, ownership percentages, and returns. These numbers are all lagging indicators of success. Although they're important, over-indexing on their value invariably leads to short-term behaviors emerging.
Short term behaviours look like:
Only investing where you see a clear path to an exit
Being overly aggressive on deal terms, like ownership and valuation
Pushing founders to raise again, raise more, and raise quickly, in pursuit of quick markups
Overpromising support to secure an allocation, and invariably underdelivering
Avoiding startups that have longer R&D periods, or unclear paths to monetization
Only showing conviction when other, more prominent investors show theirs first
Chasing “hot deals”
The best angels optimize for relationships. They understand that their personal brand with founders is an asset that will keep compounding in value with careful management.
The leading indicator of success, therefore, is something far harder to measure but impossible to fake, Founder NPS.
It's the genuine trust, goodwill, and advocacy you earn from the founders you back.
Five ways to cultivate Founder NPS
My conversation with Anh-Tho was rich with practical insights about how angels can earn genuine founder trust and support, here are my top takeaways:
Start with the right mindset
"The moment you write the check, assume you've lost the money," she advises. No matter how bullish you are on the opportunity. "It removes the pressure. It enables you to have relaxed conversations with founders because mentally you no longer have anything at stake." This psychological shift transforms every interaction from monitoring an investment to supporting a founder.
Respect their time
"Pre-series A, pre-PMF, angels that ask for too regular or too detailed updates are wasting founders' time," she notes. "Trust them to go on this PMF journey, just get out of their way." Good angels sign fast, wire fast, and only engage when they can genuinely help. It often helps to be upfront early-on about the areas you can be helpful. Write it down, send it to founders, be there when they need it.
Ask great questions
Even when Chuong sees a founder potentially heading in the wrong direction, she never says "you're going in the wrong direction." Instead, she focuses on asking questions that help founders arrive at their own conclusions. Good questions act as a forcing function to improve quality of thought, and it's a skill you need to pro-actively develop. You may even discover that your assumptions were wrong.
Create space for unstructured conversation
Before offering any advice, she asks: "Do you want to problem solve with me, or do you just want to rant? Both are fine." We're all human, sometimes we just need to vent. Oftentimes, the answers are buried somewhere in the founder's mind, and they naturally emerge when you give them space to express their thoughts in the open.
Share observations, not playbooks
If you're asked directly for advice, it shouldn't come in the form of a playbook. Playbooks rely on a host of variables that are often unique to a certain situation. "As a founder or operator yourself, you're learning by doing, and therefore, in a privileged position to be able to share those first-hand observations. By sharing what you're seeing, you're providing data points for them — increasing their aperture of a problem, not offering a solution to it," Anh-Tho explains. "Nobody really knows what a company should do other than the founder, they should follow their instincts."
Goodwill compounds
Building founder NPS involves showing up in ways that demonstrate genuine support over short-term self-interest.
It isn't about heroics. It's about the quiet moments. The easy-to-do things that most investors ignore. By doing the basics, being present but out of the way, asking good questions, and avoiding playbooks, you put yourself ahead of the pack.
As an angel, you're in a unique position to really lean into this operating model. You don't have LPs, and so you're not constantly reminded about the numbers. You don't have a fund model you have to meet.
There's tangible benefits to being founder-first. It generates mindshare and goodwill that often payback tenfold.
Your biggest source of referrals to new opportunities will likely come from your existing portfolio, you'll find it easier to "get in" to deals because you'll have strong references, and you'll ultimately learn more from the experience of angel investing because founders will open up to you and share more. It creates a flywheel.
Convert “picking winners” from an outbound strategy to an inbound one by treating your personal brand as the product, and building relationships that compound over time.