How to activate your investor network

As an angel investor, you often get asks from founders—but you rarely get an ask this personalized, crisp, and easy to act on:

Of his many superpowers, Sam Corcos (CEO of Levels) is in a league of his own when it comes to leveraging his investor network to help him build his company. I’ve never seen anything like it. I believe this one skill has contributed significantly to his company’s success. So I asked Sam to share his in-the-weeds advice about how to make the most of your investor network. Boy did he deliver. If you’re a founder, this post is for you.

Note, I’m an angel investor in Levels, which is how I uncovered this superpower. If you’d like to go deeper, Levels shares their previous investor updates and all-hands meetings publicly, and you can follow Sam on Twitter and LinkedIn. Enjoy!

I talk to a lot of founders who feel like they were sold a bill of goods by their “value add” investor, who ends up doing very little for them. I can tell you from personal experience that it’s almost always the founder’s fault that they aren’t getting value from their investors.

From June 27, 2019, to October 26, 2022 (about 3 years and 4 months), I personally sent 2,626 requests to our investor network. Of those emails sent out, 1,664 received a response, and 1,151 were able to deliver on what was asked.

Investors have very little context into what your company is doing or what you need help with, so it’s unreasonable to expect them to proactively find ways to add value. You need to learn how to ask. This might sound simple, but it actually takes a lot of practice, and most founders are not good at it.

I think activating one’s investor network is one of the biggest untapped sources of value at most startups. In this article, we’ll go over a few tactics for how to build a great investor network and how to activate them to get as much value as possible.

Executive summary

1. Build a great network by optimizing for eigenvector centrality.
2. Make good asks by keeping them targeted, time-bounded, and specific.
3. If you want someone to help you, make it as easy as possible for them.
4. Do the work. Don’t expect to receive value without putting in effort.

First, build a great investor network

What makes an investor network great? Just like with hiring, it’s about getting the right people on board; doing it right takes time. If you develop the skill of activating your investor network, it’ll be well worth the time.

The place we should start is at a higher level of abstraction, and think about networks and graphs in general. The way you structure a network has significant implications for how the network performs. We’ll only cover the high-level concepts here, but if you want to do a deeper dive on network theory, I discussed these concepts in more detail in the podcast episodes I did of Funded with Jason Yeh (Part 1, Part 2).

Eigenvector centrality

To build a really powerful network, you should optimize for what is known as eigenvector centrality:

Eigenvector centrality is an algorithm that measures the transitive influence of nodes.

In other words, it’s not “how many people you know”; it’s “how many people all the people you know, know.”

When people think about how well-networked or popular someone is, they typically think about it through the lens of degree centrality. A person with high degree centrality is a mayor of a small town, or the most popular kid in high school. Within the context of a network where everyone knows each other, they are the most connected person in that dense network:

A failure mode of building a network that is optimized for degree centrality is that everyone ends up being similar, and it’s extremely limiting when you have a request that is outside of your normal area of influence.

For example, if you create an amazing network of financiers, that’s probably helpful for fundraising, but not if you need to hire engineers, find a mentor for product strategy, or any of the thousands of other kinds of problems you’ll need to solve as a founder.

It’s for this reason that you want to focus your attention on adding new people to the network from other dense networks that you don’t already have access to. The ideal network for a founder is one where you know the person with the highest degree centrality in each network:

There’s a lot of evidence that this is true, both from personal experience and academia. For a deeper dive on this, I recommend reading the classic 1973 paper by Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties.”

Setting up your network this way significantly increases the chances that you’ll be successful in activating your investors, because you have access to the most possible surface area of connections and expertise.

To give you a sense of the diversity of backgrounds of the people we optimized for when building our investor network, here are the backgrounds of the first 15 people in alphabetical order. For reference, these cover only about 5% of the people we have engaged as investors and don’t even get us beyond the letter “a” alphabetically:

• Insurance founder
• Health tech founder
• Health and wellness writer
• YouTube creator
• Professional basketball player
• Product leader at major tech company
• Partnerships leader at organic foods company
• Growth leader at direct-to-consumer software company
• Talent network company founder
• Partner at major consulting firm
• International expansion leader at major tech company
• Podcast host
• Sales leader at Fortune 500 company
• Education tech founder
• Wellness-focused venture capitalist

You should also give some attention to other networks you may need to access in the future, no matter how unrelated they might seem today. Having a single entry point into a network is infinitely more valuable than having zero. It makes a huge difference if you know one professional basketball player, one person who is an insurance industry executive, or one person in state government.

It’s always best to have every possible type of diversity of people on your cap table. Some of our highest-value angel investors were people with little to no public persona. These tend to be early employees at post-IPO companies who have some liquidity and more time available. Some of our most trajectory-changing advice came from people like Alex Cunningham, Ellen DaSilva, Razvan Roman, Alexey Komissarouk, and other active operators who are under the radar but have a lot to contribute.

For some people, you’ll only be able to get their attention for a few minutes per month. Others, you can ask for a few hours per quarter. Having a mix of both is a huge asset.

Set expectations

It’s also important to set expectations early. Ideally, you should be thinking about building your investor network as solving for a matching problem rather than a sales problem (i.e. you’re looking to find the right match, not convince them to join).

If you expect your investors to be actively involved, you should let them know before you accept their money. This is really important because it gives you permission to hold them accountable to what they’ve agreed to, and many investors will opt out (example below). That’s fine! People have different priorities and availability. It’s not personal.

Here’s an actual snippet that I’ve sent to several investors to set early expectations:

For example, here’s a conversation I had with a potential investor where, after setting clear expectations that we’d like them to be actively involved, they opted out because they didn’t have bandwidth. And there’s nothing wrong with that! Where these situations get tricky is when those expectations aren’t set early on and one side feels like the other is being unreasonable.

Then, activate your network

Once you have a network of capable investors involved, you need to spend time extracting value from your cap table. Don’t expect this will happen automatically; it takes serious work, but it’s worth the effort.

Here are a few tactical things to keep in mind.

Abundance mindset

The first thing is to remember that investor requests are not like precious gems. Many founders think you only get a certain number of “chips” to cash in with your investors (this is an analogy I’ve heard many times). This mindset is not accurate, but it tends to develop after a series of unresponded-to emails to their investors. But most of the time, the investors aren’t responding because the asks are bad.

In general, people like being helpful—especially investors! It’s a big part of their job. You know the joy you experience when you’re able to help out another founder? By not asking for things, you’re denying other people that joy. Personally, I love it when I’m able to make an easy intro or give some quick advice to someone that changes the trajectory of their project.

Set them up for success by making good asks.

What to ask

As a founder, you should always know what you and your team need. I have a snippet in TextExpander called “asks” that I paste in anytime someone says, “How can I be helpful?” in an email, which I then pare down to just the requests that are relevant to them. Most people would be shocked at how many times that simple action has led to significant value creation.

Every month, my EA sends a message to our team asking them for two things that they could use help with. The responses are consolidated and added to our investor update, and I add them to my list as well.

You should make it easy for your team to tell you what they need, but you should also do the work yourself. If you’re the founder, you likely have the most context of anyone else at the company, so your investor asks are probably the highest-leverage in the organization. If you can’t think of anything you need help with, you’re not thinking hard enough. Everyone at every stage needs support.

How to ask

You should approach your investor asks like you would approach building a product. Think about it from the perspective of the person receiving the request. How do you make it easy for them?

If I had to simplify what makes for a good investor ask into three main concepts, they would be:

• Targeted: Only send them to the people who are relevant
• Time-bounded: Ideally, executing the request should take less than a minute
• Specific: Be specific in your request, and limit the scope of the request (see chunking bias)

Instead of going through each of these concepts individually, we’ll go through a bunch of examples below to show you what a good investor ask looks like.

On a tactical level, we don’t use any special tooling other than email and a list of our investors in a Google Sheet. Anytime we need to send out an investor ask, I skim the list and I personally send an email to each person who I think might be able to contribute. That’s all. No need to overcomplicate it.

I find it helpful to ask each investor what kinds of things they typically help with and write them down (I was impressed with one investor in particular who maintains a Notion doc with everything he can help with), but in general, whenever I have an ask, I spend 5 to 10 minutes looking through the list of people and sending emails to the folks who I think might be willing and able to help. Here’s a redacted screenshot of a subset of the Google Sheet:

Computers are good at remembering things (like maintaining a list of everyone you have access to), and humans are good at connecting the dots. In my experience, it’s best to use computers for keeping lists of things and use one’s brain to do anything involving people, like crafting and sending asks. The hard part is committing to put in the work. No tool can help with that.

Examples

1. Tom, who leads Partnerships for us at Levels, started working on a marketplace project, and he was looking for advice from people who have built marketplaces in the past.

We happen to have two people on our cap table who are legitimately world experts on marketplaces—Jeff Jordan from a16z and Sander Daniels from Thumbtack.

This is the email we sent to each of them asking for their time:

1. Another example is a request from Zac, who runs Legal at Levels. He was looking to connect with other people who have run legal practices within startups, and had some specific questions around fundraising and cap table management.

One of our investors, Katie Biber Chen, has led legal teams at a number of tech companies and also has a strong network of other general counsels.

1. As we geared up for our next funding round, we wanted to learn more about independent board member selection. So we sent an email to a few of our investors who are currently or have been founders who work with independent board members, or people who have held independent board member positions.

1. At some point as we increased the size of our engineering team, we felt like our development velocity was slowing down on a per-engineer basis. So we went through our investor list and emailed a few people who have run engineering orgs to get their thoughts on how they think about measuring velocity.

1. After we got feedback from the engineers from the question above, we realized that we needed to get more input—especially from people who have run product orgs. So we emailed a bunch of founders to get a quick request for input.

1. When we started the process for hiring a Lead Designer, we realized that we didn’t know how to run a process or assess the quality of the candidates we were seeing. So we sent a few emails to people who have hired lead designers in the past to find out what they look for.

1. When we were putting together our medical advisory group, we knew that we wanted to get Dr. Sara Gottfried on board, so we reached out to a bunch of our investors who we thought might be able to get us one step closer to making that connection.

1. Sometimes we also request meaningful time from someone if they’re open to it. For example, when we were hiring someone to lead our Growth team, we really wanted to make sure we did our homework and got as many opinions as possible.

In this case, we asked a couple of our investors who have led growth orgs before to review the recordings of candidates’ technical interviews to give us feedback. These are big asks and take more than an hour, so be mindful of who you send these to and how much time you’re requesting from them.

1. When we started increasing our hiring rate for engineering, we wanted to increase our pipeline. Most good engineers know other good engineers, so I wanted to start talking to engineers who our investors thought were great with the hope that they might have someone in their network looking for their next role.

This is also a good example of being specific. Specifying “two best engineers” reduces the cognitive load put on the recipient and increases the chances that they send you a response.

1. And last but not least, here’s an example of an email to one of our investors who, in a previous discussion, mentioned that he was interested in some of the company-building content we’d been producing. So I asked him what kind of content he’d like to see more of.

Always follow up

When an investor (or really, anyone) delivers on one of your requests, you should follow up with them at the conclusion of whatever it is they delivered. For example, if they connected you to an engineering candidate or a potential advisor, after you speak with that person, you should send a thank-you note to the person who made the connection to close the loop and let them know that their effort did not go to waste.

Even just a simple note (like the one above) goes a long way, and it significantly increases the likelihood that this person will offer their support in the future.

Sending follow-ups and appreciation takes very little time, and yet in my experience, almost nobody puts in the work to do them.

Analysis

As anyone who’s followed our journey knows, we’re pretty rigorous about tracking things. 😆 I keep track of all the requests I’ve sent to our investors since we started the company, as well as the reply rate and the rate at which those requests have converted into something meaningful. Our EA team keeps it up to date on a monthly basis.

Results

As I mentioned above, from June 27, 2019, to October 26, 2022 (about 3 years and 4 months), I personally sent 2,626 requests to our investor network. Of those emails sent out, 1,664 received a response, and 1,151 were able to deliver on what was asked.

This also significantly under-reports the number of requests from our company, because this does not include people who directly responded to the asks on our monthly investor updates, and it doesn’t include times when people on our team directly reached out to our investors without my involvement. The actual number is likely at least double what I have noted above.

Here’s the top 10 list of our most helpful investors:

Helpfulness outliers

Something that stuck out to me when doing this analysis (and not something I was actively searching for) is that the women on our cap table have been disproportionately helpful. As measured on an allocation-to-conversions ratio, the women have outperformed by more than 10x. I don’t have a theory for why this is, and the sample size is not small (we have more than 30 women on our cap table). I’m not going to speculate, but it’s an interesting observation.

Along those same lines, early employees of post-IPO companies have been extremely generous with their time and have sourced a disproportionate number of great candidates for us. Most of these folks invested relatively small checks but delivered huge value.

a16z and the “services model”

Another interesting fact is that, although only Jeff Jordan and Vijay Pande from the a16z team are listed on the sheet, that tells only a small part of the story. They’re the ones who quarterback requests, but those entry-point requests often turn into several follow-up conversations.

One thing that was uncovered from some deeper analysis back in October 2021 was that our team has had meaningful interactions with 94 people on the a16z team. This covers everything ranging from support on HR policy, advice on growth strategy, financial model review, network connections—you name it and we’ve probably asked them for it.

Some venture capital firms (a16z in particular) have a “services model,” where they have a team of operators that you can tap into when you have questions or need support. It is in your interest to discover what services are available and take advantage of them.

In closing

Activating one’s investor network is among the most underutilized resources that almost every startup has access to. It takes practice to learn how to do it well, but once you do, it can be a tremendous and differentiating source of value.

You can follow Sam on Twitter and LinkedIn, and definitely check out Levels Health. Thanks, Sam!

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