Angel Investing

Together with Sue Odio, I angel invest in early-stage startups we're excited about. Think of us as advisors with skin in the game — we love helping with tricky, ambiguous problems, providing access to our networks and audiences, or even just lending an ear.

Max is one of our highest value-add investors: he constantly gives us good product feedback and knows everything about open source. On top of that, every time he talks about us to his developer audience our stats go wild. – Brendan Falk, CEO at Fig

If you're founding a startup and think this could be a good fit, we'd love to meet you through a warm intro (check my X, my LinkedIn, or Sue's LinkedIn for mutual connections!).1

What we invest in

We invest first-and-foremost in the people. Our main filter is "Do we believe these founders can go through the one-of-a-kind challenge of building a company that can change the world?"

We love investing early to make the most of the limited amount of money we have. The earlier, the better.

I personally love investing in products that I (would) use myself, even more so if they're products aimed at developers.

Investments

So far, I have invested in:

  • Fly.io — a developer-focused cloud for deploying apps close to users (Series A -> $70M Series C led by EQT Ventures)
  • Incident.io — the #1 platform for incident management (Seed -> $62M Series B led by Insight Partners)
  • Clerk — an authentication and user management platform (Seed -> $50M Series C led by Menlo & Anthropic)
  • Raycast — an extensible MacOS launcher (Series A -> $30M Series B led by Atomico)
  • Zed — a high-performance, AI native code editor (Seed -> $32M Series B led by Sequoia)
  • Upstash — a data platform for the serverless world (Seed -> $10M Series A led by a16z)
  • Arcjet — a security layer for Node.js (Seed → $8.3M Series A led by Plural)
  • Flox — a development environment toolchain based on Nix (Series B)
  • Liveblocks — a toolchain to build real-time collaborative products (Seed)
  • Remote First Capital — a fund by Andreas Klinger (Fund II)
  • Magic Bell — an embeddable notification system (Seed)
  • DevJobs — a job matching platform for developers (Seed)
  • Outsmartly — a CDN for performantly personalizing websites (Series A)
  • Storytell.ai — an AI tool to extract signal from noise (Seed)
  • DX (acq. by Atlassian) — the developer experience platform (Seed → $1B acquisition)
  • Campsite (acq. by Notion) — an all-in-one team communication app (Seed)
  • Fig (acq. by AWS) — a terminal for the 21st century (Seed)
  • StackShare (acq. by Fossa) — a system of record for tech stacks (Series A)
  • Muse (acq. by bootstrapper) — a tool for thought for deep work (Seed)
  • Abbot (sunset) — a copilot for customer success in Slack (Seed)
  • Along (sunset) — an online video platform focussed on creators (Seed)
  • Rome (sunset) — a modern JavaScript toolchain (Seed)
1

We do this on the side and really try to help the startups we back, so we don't have time to talk to everybody. Somebody we respect and trust vouching for you is an important signal in our process.

← Max Stoiber