How To Engage With An Investor with Level CEO Sam Corcos

Capital Structure and Investor Overhead

• Founders face a trade-off between a concentrated lead investment and a distributed round of many smaller investors; the latter introduces significant administrative overhead.
• The speaker's company mobilized approximately 100 angels and operators early on, leveraging them consistently for the first two years prior to institutional capital.
• Despite the abundance of angel investors, the speaker notes that very few founders successfully extract tangible value from their networks.

Strategic Investor Engagement Practices

• What Does Not Work:
  • Founders should never assume investors can read their minds or possess the same daily context as the founding team.
  • Passive criticism of investor disengagement is ineffective when founders have not proactively initiated contact.
  • Vague requests (e.g., "let me know if you know any good designers") result in near-zero conversion rates.
• What Does Work:
  • Founders must explicitly define and document their specific needs before asking for assistance; a response of "I don't know" indicates a failed strategy.
  • Investor updates should include a dedicated "asks" section listing specific needs, which regularly yields conversions.
  • High-leverage requests are characterized by high specificity, clear time bounds, and targeted recipients rather than broad noise.
  • Requests should be concise enough to be actionable within one minute to bypass cognitive filtering.

Data-Driven Metrics and Conversion Strategies

• The speaker reports executing over 3,000 specific investor "asks," achieving a conversion rate of approximately 50% within that specific cohort.
• In contrast, the average founder is estimated to send only about five requests per year, suggesting a significantly lower total value extraction.
• The "chunking bias" principle is applied by making requests concrete and easy to execute (e.g., "connect me with the two best designers you've worked with").
• For sales and partnership pipelines, founders can share Google Sheets with direct hyperlinks to target companies and specific personnel.
  • Founders are advised to add their names to the sheet to create a visible "social competition" dynamic among investors who wish to demonstrate their utility.
• To maximize accountability, founders should perform pre-work by identifying mutual connections on LinkedIn and proposing specific, one-degree-separation introductions for the investor to facilitate.

Expectation Management

• Founders are advised to set clear, explicit expectations regarding investor engagement levels (e.g., response times, email participation) early in the relationship.
• If an investor cannot meet defined engagement standards, the speaker suggests that the partnership may not be a strategic fit regardless of capital availability.