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After her first five years of angel investing, Sandy Kory found her quantitative…

2026-07-01 · 13:54 UTC ·@sandykory ·2 min read

Brief

Sandy Kory says she stopped relying on numeric founder/market/traction/team rankings after five years and now trusts simple heuristics—especially imagining her reaction when competitors arrive. She argues strong, earned insights almost always provoke multiple startups and VC interest within 6–12 months, and she favors founders with obsessive execution (e.g., BillionToOne, SendCutSend, Baseten) who thrive amid competition.

Why it matters

After her first five years of angel investing, Sandy Kory found her quantitative rankings of founders, market, traction, and team were “noise,” so she now uses simple heuristics—most notably asking, “how am I going to feel when the competition arrives?” (post dated 2026-07-01).

Key details

  • She claims a founder’s high-quality, earned market insight typically draws multiple startups and likely at least one bet each from Sequoia, Kleiner, and Andreessen within 6–12 months; if that competition never materializes, she interprets it as the market not existing.
  • Kory prefers teams with exceptional execution and cites investments that validated this view—BillionToOne, SendCutSend, and Baseten—and names founders (Oguzhan, @jimbelosic, @tuhinone) as “maniacs” at execution, which makes her excited rather than worried when rivals appear.
Source evidence

For my first 5 years of angel investing, I ranked everything. Founders, market, traction, team. But when I looked back on the data, it was all noise. So instead of fancy quantitative systems, I get much more personal mileage from a few simple heuristics today.

One of my favorites is to ask myself: how am I going to feel when the competition arrives?

I've tried other frameworks. Peter Thiel wants to invest in monopolies. Jason Lemkin from SaaStr says he invests in CEOs who are better than him. As the sort-of CEO of a little company for a few years, that one doesn't really work for me. A lot of what passes for wisdom here is moderately helpful at best, pseudoscientific cliché at worst. When something is called part art or science, I think they mean the science isn’t that good. Or they misunderstand the meaning of science. For me, I’d say my science of evaluating founders is a work in progress.

But one thing I know for certain is that if a founder has a high-quality, earned insight into a market opportunity, there will be many other startups funded to target the same market in the next 6-12 months. Sequoia, Kleiner, and Andreessen are likely each going to back one, and some of them will attract great talent.

In short, the competition is coming. And if I’m wrong about that, it just means the market wasn't there.

Now, I've had angel investments in companies where someone came to the market, and I started to worry. I've been in that category more than I'd like. And then I've had others–like BillionToOne or SendCutSend or Baseten–where competitors start to flood the market, and I couldn’t wait to watch them take each one behind the woodshed. I wasn’t a Bulls fan in the 90s, but that’s probably what it felt like.

The reason I don’t worry is always the same: they’re amazing at execution and they’re building great businesses that will compound for a long time. Oguzhan and @jimbelosic and @tuhinone are all maniacs in this department. And because they know what great looks like here, they’ve built teams full of people similarly gifted at executing on a mission.

After years of rankings that were nothing more than noise, the difference between “Oh boy…” and “This is going to be fun” is what I've come to trust.

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