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Angel Diaries with Nic Lenz: Backing the Founder, Not Just the Deal
Founder diligence, long-term alignment, and protecting your investment in the AI era
Session overview
In a market where anyone can build a product in an afternoon, what actually makes an early-stage company defensible? For Nic Lenz, the answer increasingly comes down to one thing: the founder.
With over 30 angel investments and 25 companies active in his portfolio, and around seven to eight years into his angel journey, Nic has developed a distinctive, hands-on approach to early-stage investing. Rather than assessing deals from a distance, he often spends months mentoring and working alongside founders before writing a cheque, giving him a level of founder due diligence most angels never achieve.
In this session, Nic shares how his extensive mentoring work with leading universities and accelerators feeds both his deal flow and his conviction, why he now over-indexes on founder domain expertise in an AI-driven world, and how staying close to founders helps him protect his investment as companies scale and cap tables get crowded.
This is a candid, practical conversation for angels who want to move beyond spreadsheets and truly understand the people they back.
Key discussion points
1. Why the founder matters more than ever
- How the rise of AI tools (Lovable and others) has made defensibility and “moat” far harder to pin down
- Why Nic is deliberately over-indexing on founder domain expertise and lived experience of the problem
- The reality that a strong team and network now matter more than the product itself
2. Founder due diligence done properly
- How Nic uses mentoring with Imperial, Cambridge, Entrepreneur First and others as a funnel and a diligence tool
- Why he may spend three months working closely with a founder before investing
- How to genuinely assess a person, not just a pitch
3. Being an angel means supporting
- “The clue’s in the name” – why the supporting role is the job, especially in the hard early days citeturn15search1
- How advisory and board roles help protect and grow the investment
- Why supporting founders makes you a better, stronger angel for every future deal
4. Protecting your stake as the company grows
- The capital-stacking problem: how a company can succeed while early angels don’t
- Staying close to founders, and the value of a “in it for the journey” handshake (as with his standout company, TEM, heading into Series C)
- Soft-touch ways to protect long-term value when VCs want to clean up the cap table
5. Pattern recognition and benchmarking
- How 25+ active companies build the pattern recognition to steer younger founders away from avoidable mistakes
- Using your strongest companies to define “what good looks like” across the portfolio
