What's up everyone? This is Alex Lieberman co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder's journal

My personal audio diary where I give you the business builder the tools you need to think better in order to build better

Whether that's building a business a team or a new product today. I'm talking about how I became an angel investor

Let's hop into it

Since 2020 I have been angel investing in a range of startups at different stages of the startup life cycle

On this episode I want to share with you how I got into the game and how I decided to make my first three investments

Before my first investment I had very little exposure to the space

I knew that angel investors were individuals that invested professionally in early stage companies part or full time

I knew the angels that had invested in Morning Brew when we had raised our I guess what would be considered a pre-seed round in late 2016

early 2017

I had a few friends in the New York startup ecosystem that had been investing as angels for a while and seemed to be really enjoying it

And I followed a few angel investing legends on Twitter people like Chris Saka you lot Gil and Jason Calcannus

But beyond that I knew nothing about angel investing how to do it and I had never done it myself

So in November of 2020 a friend approached me about a startup and that's what got my angel career off the ground

My friend explained to me that he was raising a syndicate to invest in a new lifestyle brand

And he asked me if I wanted to be a part of it

If you have no idea what a syndicate is that is totally fine I had zero idea at the time

I ended up putting $10,000 into the business

There was no rhyme or reason for that specific check size other than that I didn't want to lose a ton of it failed

But I wanted it to be enough such that I felt a fire under my ass to feel confident in my investing decision

The money had to feel real which is why while the dollar amount was relatively arbitrary

My thought process in the investment was a bit more calculated

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