I am an advisor at mobile.dev, receiving equity-based compensation in return. I only advise companies where I go back with founders, and I'm also excited about their approach.
As of 2022, I am no longer taking on advising or investment opportunities. This is for the same reason I do not hold individual stocks: I want to remain unbiased in my analysis in The Pragmatic Engineer. I always disclose when I mention a company that I have invested in or where I am an advisor.
Investments
My main areas of investment interest were developer tooling, engineering productivity, platforms, and software engineering education.
My investment philosophy was simple: I invested in companies I'd jump at the opportunity to work at, if I was not busy with my own business.
I am not actively looking for investments since 2022.
Entire: rebuilding the dev tool stack for the agentic era. Built by GitHub's last CEO, Thomas Dohmke, with a full-remote team.
incident.io: the way incident management should be. Founding members build one of the best incident management systems across the industry at Monzo. Now they're building an even better one for anyone to use. One of the most forward-thinking teams I know of. See open jobs.
Wordsmith: AI agents that give in-house legal teams a suite of AI tools. These tools remove productivity bottlenecks and improve how the legal team works with the rest of the business.
mobile.dev: setting a new standard for mobile development.
Fonoa: automating taxes for the Internet economy.
Invact Metaversity. The future of online education, cofounded by Tanay Pratap, one of the most committed teachers I know.
Block Party. Use social media without harassment.
PillSorted: medications delivered to your home in the UK. Their former CTO is someone I worked with for years at Skype.
Craft Docs: Probably the best writing experience for digital devices, founded by my brother. Apple awarded it the Mac App of the Year award in 2021. It is the only "investment" where I have no financial stake - I don't mix family and business. See open jobs.
Other investments: I've made another few smaller investments via the Uber Alumni Investment Club in 2021-2022. I'm not listing these out individually, as I am not involved with those companies, beyond investing via the syndicate.
Exited
DX: maximizing engineering efficiency, in a way that works. Acquired by Atlassian.
Graphite: code reviews, reimagined. Acquired by Cursor.
Shut down
Most startups fail - and so have some of the ones I've invested in. Ones that ended up like this that have shut down since:
Edify: a startup with the mission to build frictionless onboarding for software engineers.
Rise Calendar: their mission was to help teams get more important work done. They had a world-class founding team, and I worked on the same team as their cofounder/CTO, Willem.
Progression: aimed to build the next generation of career design tools. There's a huge need for what they do, and I love the energy the team has. From the creators of Progression.fyi.
Stashpad: built a developer notepad. A way to manage your working memory (RAM) as you do your daily work. I loved this startup as they started with the best scratchpad any engineer can ask for, and then make it super easy to extend, share and customize it.
"How can I get into angel investing?"
I get this question a lot more from software engineers. I don't have definite answers, but here's how I got into angel investing.
Be aware that when investing, you are likely to have your investment tied up for 10+ years. Also, you can lose everything you invest – this has happened to me several times already! Invest only money that you can afford to lose 100% of.