Justin GordonFounder, The LA Grind & The SF Grind

Why Passionate Investors are the Next Startup Superpower

23 May 2025 · 1 min

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1:18

In this monologue, Justin Gordon reflects on his fundraising experience, emphasizing that the most valuable investors are often not the ones writing the largest checks but smaller angel backers who are deeply passionate about the startup. He describes how conducting a "party round"—raising small amounts from many investors—creates an army of evangelists who can introduce talent, promote the company, and open doors to additional capital. While acknowledging the logistical headache of pitching to many investors, he argues that the strategic advantage of having a broad, economically‑aligned support network outweighs the extra effort.

Chapters

One of the things I also learned through that first fundraise is, in many cases, your most helpful investors are not your largest checks. And you have to have seen this many times over the years. But, you know, some of, by far, our most helpful investors were folks who wrote $50K, $25K angel checks, but really loved what we were doing, had deep kind of relevant experience, and were extremely generous with their time. And like, I'm very, very glad I did the party round on that fundraise. And I very deliberately repeated again with Kavana. We've now raised from like 90 people. And this time quite intentionally, because you basically just like mint an army of evangelists who can introduce amazing talent to you, help kind of promote you broadly, get you in front of basically any investor you could ever want to talk to across any capital market. And so like, that's a superpower, right? Like other than the minor headache of having to pitch a lot of people. A lot more. Yeah. Which like, whatever, just chew a little more glass, right? Like, yeah, you're doing it anyways. Take a few more meetings in a day. That's not the end of the world. You know, like other than that, it's, it is, it is a pretty big advantage to just have a lot of people who care about you and are economically incented for you to succeed.