Most angel investors get their start when a founder friend asks them to write a check. They say yes, and slowly start doing it again and again. Somewhere along the way, they realize they wanted to get serious about this — but there isn’t an obvious path to getting better.
Angel investing sits in a weird middle ground. It’s not your day job, but it’s not exactly a hobby either. You’re writing meaningful checks, but fitting it into the margins of everything else you have going on. No one teaches you how to source, evaluate, or build a portfolio that isn’t just a random collection of checks written for friends. Most people figure it out slowly, over years of (expensive) trial and error.
Instead of yet another scout program, we set out to build a curriculum drawn from studying the world’s best angel investors and from First Round’s own decades of pre-PMF investing. In an effort to pair this with a small cohort for a deeper sense of community, we somehow convinced folks like Ayo Omojola (former CPO at Carbon Health) and Vivek Patel (former COO at Postmates) to become inaugural members. This initial group of 16 met up for bi-weekly sessions at our old San Francisco office.
Now more than a dozen cohorts and 400+ alumni later, Angel Track has evolved into the most influential angel investing ecosystem in the world, a place where serious angel investors come to sharpen their craft. There’s a wide range of impressive career paths in this community we’ve built up over the years, including:
- Founders like Parallel’s Parag Agrawal, Clay’s Varun Anand, Instacart’s Max Mullen, Loyal’s Celine Halioua, and Newfront’s Gordon Wintrob
- Execs like Linear’s Cristina Cordova, LangChain's Julia Schottenstein, Rippling’s Anique Drumright, Vanta’s Stevie Case, Peloton’s Nick Caldwell, Privy’s Max Segall, and Coinbase’s Ben Shanken
- Builders on the frontier of AI like Stripe’s Jeff Weinstein, Notion’s Lauryn Motamedi, Cursor’s Ben Lang, Anthropic’s Jenny Wen, and OpenAI’s James Dyett, Romain Huet, and Tara Seshan.
- Full-time investors like Lightspeed’s Justin Overdorff, a16z’s David Haber, FPV’s Nikunj Kothari, Y Combinator’s Andrew Miklas, Pathlight’s Charley Ma, Coalition’s Ashley Mayer (and First Round’s own Meka Asonye).
- Creators like Lenny Rachitsky, Mario Gabriele’s The Generalist, Emily Kramer’s MKT1, Dan Shipper’s Every, and Claire Vo’s ChatPRD and How I AI.
Alongside the talent-dense cohorts, the curriculum we’ve honed over the years is incredibly tactical, with real case studies and actual data from our own 20+ years of investing, as well as specific lessons on everything from sourcing and positioning to evaluating teams, portfolio construction and tax planning.
We've tried many different iterations of Angel Track over the years, from a series of in-person meetups in our SF and NY office spread over weeks or months, to remote nationwide sessions during the COVID era.
But more recently, we've been leaning into an immersive, in-person retreat format. It’s designed to be a few focused and highly impactful days away from everything, where you can actually dig into the meaty material while building even deeper relationships with the stellar angels in your cohort who are equally committed to getting sharper.
We’ll share the exact dates and location of the retreat shortly, but in the meantime you can fill out this form here.
Most people who join the cohort have made between 5-15 investments — but we primarily look for founders and company builders at both early and late-stage tech companies who are at an inflection point in their investing journey and are eager to support founders with more than just a check.
Get your application in here by January 18th, 2026 to be considered.