Become an angel investor 😇

“Why get a check when you could get a checkbook?” - Naval Ravikant

That’s the sentiment powering Spearhead, a bold new approach to venture started by AngelList co-founder Naval and Accomplice founder, Jeff Fagnan. Spearhead was founded on the notion that startup founders make the best investors, and companies founded by a team with both founder and investor experience have a sort of startup superpower. 🔥

Spearhead launched in 2017 and originally provided founders with $200,000 in investment capital from its first fund. This week the firm announced that it plans to give its founders 5x more capital to play with — $1 million to 15 founders, to be exact.

How it actually works: This group of founders will get their own fund so they can learn the craft of angel investing to increase their chance of future success. To be eligible to become a Spearhead “lead,” you must live in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston or New York City and run (or very recently have run) a startup. Once a founder goes through the two-year program, he or she can also apply for $10 million (to invest) after graduation. 35 founders have completed the program so far, and Spearhead just opened up applications for its third cohort.

The Spearhead leads have invested in 160 companies to date, including startups like ZeroDown, Cloosiv, O.school, PopSQL, Sword Health, Superplastic, Height, AirGarage, Scythe and Altitude Networks.

With infrastructure like Spearhead, AngelList, and scout networks available, there’s more early-stage investors than ever. If you’re interested in learning the investing ropes, this is a good guide to understanding how early-stage funding works and this will teach you how to invest.

Apply to Spearhead

We asked 34 customers what Viktor does for them. Not one said chatbot.

They kept using words like colleague, coworker, team member. One CEO called it the glue holding their e-commerce business together, which is a lot, but also… you see why. It lives in Slack and plugs into 3,000+ tools, so instead of jumping between tabs, you just ask for the thing. Pull Stripe against HubSpot, check Sentry alerts, spin up a campaign brief, build a landing page, send a report upstairs. It all happens there.

It has already hit top 5 on Product Hunt with 130 comments, is SOC 2 certified, and your data does not train models.

One user said it was the first time AI felt like a real coworker, which is either exciting or slightly concerning depending on your week.