The Angel Investor With 35+ Deals & $1B+ In Combined Valuations Is Telling Everyday Americans… “You Were Too Late For SpaceX”

The people who built generational wealth on SpaceX built it years ago, quietly, when the company was still private, still unproven, still the kind of bet that made serious investors nervous — when a small group of angel investors wrote checks that most people in their lives thought were insane.

Those investors didn’t get rich because they were smarter than everyone else. They got rich because they were earlier than everyone else, and there is no substitute for that in the history of investing.

By the time a company hits $1.75 trillion and lands on the front page of every financial newspaper in America, the wealth-creation event is essentially over for new investors. The easy upside is already priced in, the risk-reward ratio that made the early angels wealthy has long since collapsed, and what’s left is a crowded trade with a ceiling instead of an open sky.

I’m not saying don’t follow SpaceX now that it’s public — it was one of the most significant financial events in recent memory, and I watched it as closely as anyone.

What I am saying is this: if you’re focused on buying SpaceX, you’re looking at the wrong door.

While the entire investing world is staring at that IPO, something far more important is happening quietly in the background — something the SpaceX story actually proves better than anything I could ever say, and something that is creating the most significant angel investing opportunity I’ve seen in the decade I’ve spent inside this world.

The people who got rich on SpaceX didn’t have a secret network. They didn’t have a Goldman Sachs contact in their phone. They weren’t born into the right family. They had one thing that most people don’t even know is available to them: they got into the deal before the crowd arrived, when the company was still private, still unproven, and still accepting checks from everyday investors who understood what they were looking at.

And because of a law that changed in 2016 — one that permanently removed the velvet rope between everyday Americans and early-stage startup deals — you can do exactly the same thing. Not with SpaceX, but with the companies that are where SpaceX was a decade ago.

That’s the door nobody’s looking at right now, and that’s the one I want to walk you through today.

Something is shifting in the startup world right now, and the smartest founders are leading it.

For decades, venture capital firms called every shot in early-stage investing. They decided which companies got built, which founders got funded, and which everyday Americans got left out of the deals that created generational wealth. But a new generation of founders is starting to ask a different question.

Why take money from a VC firm that wants board control, dictates your timeline, and has no stake in your mission beyond the return — when you could raise from thousands of everyday investors who become customers, advocates, and brand ambassadors the moment they write a check?

The smartest founders have figured out that an army of invested believers sharing their mission is worth more than a single wire transfer from Sand Hill Road. And because of that 2016 law, those founders can now come directly to people like you and me — not as a last resort, but as a deliberate, strategic choice.

That’s the shift. And that’s the door that’s wide open right now.

Here’s the thing history has proven, repeatedly, without a single exception I’ve ever been able to find. The people who understood what was happening — not after it became obvious, but while everyone else was too scared to pay attention — built the kind of wealth that doesn’t just change their lives, it changes the trajectory of their entire family line.

Think about late 2008 and into 2009. While the rest of the world was panicking, a small group of angel investors was quietly writing checks into deals that would define the next decade of American business — at prices and terms that simply don’t exist at any other point in the cycle.

Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia couldn’t get a single institutional investor to take Airbnb seriously; they pitched seven venture capital firms and got turned down by all seven. So they turned to angel investors instead — investors who understood what they were looking at and were willing to act when the big money wouldn’t. The angels who said yes in that moment watched their investment grow into one of the most valuable companies on earth.

Travis Kalanick was building Uber at the same moment, during the same recession, with the same institutional skepticism surrounding him. The angel investors who got into that earliest round — before the VC machines showed up and locked everyone else out — saw their investment grow by approximately 22,000 times by the time Uber went public.

Instagram’s earliest angels did even better, with documented returns of over 31,200% in under two years. They made those returns not because they were financial geniuses with Ivy League degrees, but because they were in the deal before it became obvious, before the crowd arrived, and before the price reflected what the company was actually building.

And SpaceX, the company everyone raced to buy a piece of at $1.75 trillion? The angels who got into those earliest rounds weren’t waiting for the IPO to feel the impact. Their stakes were already worth hundreds of times what they paid — long before the public ever got a chance to buy in.

Here’s what I want you to understand with complete clarity about what happens when institutional money retreats from early-stage deals: the quality of what becomes available doesn’t go down. It goes up.

The founders getting funded purely on hype — a slide deck, a big vision, the right connections in San Francisco — those deals dry up first. The froth disappears. What you’re left with are the founders building something real, something that solves a genuine problem, that would have found its way to a major VC firm in a healthy market but right now needs a different kind of investor.

And the competition for those deals — from the Sequoias and the Andreessen Horowitzes and the institutional machines that normally crowd everyday investors out — is lower than it has been in over a decade.

I’ve been inside this world for nearly ten years, evaluated hundreds of deals, and put my own money into over 35 companies, and I’ll say this with complete conviction: the legal changes that opened this asset class to everyday Americans, combined with a generation of founders actively choosing people over institutions, has created the most significant angel investing window I have ever personally witnessed.

But this window won’t stay open indefinitely. The institutional money always comes back. The VC firms always return once the picture clears, and when they do, the velvet rope goes back up and everyday investors get pushed back to the sidelines. The investors who look back at this period as the moment that changed everything for their families are not the ones who act after that happens. They’re the ones seeing this right now and deciding they won’t let this window close without being inside it.

Every generation in American history has been handed a version of the moment we’re living through right now — a moment where the smartest investors stopped chasing the obvious plays everyone else was crowding into and quietly moved into early-stage deals at terms that don’t exist at any other point in the cycle. It’s not random, it’s not luck, and it’s not a theory. It’s a pattern. I call it the Three Phases.

Let me show you exactly how this has played out, twice, with names you’ll recognize.

That is the pattern, and it has repeated with remarkable consistency across every major cycle in modern history. And right now, the market is sending a signal anyone paying attention should recognize immediately.

IPOs are surging. SpaceX just went public. The headlines are euphoric. Everyone feels like a genius. And if you know your history, you know exactly what that means — the biggest IPO waves have always come right before institutional money gets nervous and the flood becomes the freeze. It happened in 1999. It happened in 2007. The pattern is forming again right now.

Which means Phase Three — the opening — isn’t years away. It’s forming right now, in real time.

In 2015, I was building a business on Amazon, and by most measures it was working — real revenue, real capital, the kind of thing people look at and say, okay, he figured it out. But I had capital sitting in conventional investments, stocks and index funds, crawling along at returns that felt completely disconnected from the effort I was putting into the real world.

Then I started paying attention to what my most successful entrepreneur friends were doing with their money, and it stopped me cold. They weren’t buying index funds. They were investing in private companies — early-stage startups — with a level of conviction and excitement I’d never seen anyone bring to a stock ticker.

I started asking questions, and I discovered something that changed the entire direction of my financial life. In 2016, a law changed — part of the JOBS Act — and it did something that had never happened before in the history of American investing: it opened the world of angel investing to everyday Americans who weren’t already millionaires. For the first time, you didn’t need to be an accredited investor with a million-dollar net worth to put money into early-stage startups. The velvet rope had been quietly, legally, permanently removed.

And I remember thinking the same thing you might be thinking right now: if the Bezoses and the Cubans and everyone who built serious multigenerational wealth have always done this, and now I can too — why is nobody talking about it?

So I jumped in. I made real mistakes early, the kind that cost real money. But I kept going, kept learning, kept refining how I thought about deals and founders and markets, and slowly — then all at once — things started to shift.

Today I’ve personally invested in over 35 startups with a combined valuation that now exceeds $1 billion. I’ve sat across the table from founders who built extraordinary companies, invested alongside Kevin O’Leary and Mark Cuban, been invited to ring both the NYSE bell and the Nasdaq, and helped thousands of everyday investors — people with no Wall Street connections, no Ivy League network, no family office behind them — get into deals once kept completely out of reach.

But here’s the most important thing I can tell you about who I am: I don’t share a deal I haven’t already put my own money into. Not once. Not ever. Not as a policy for appearances, but because the only way to give someone trustworthy guidance on a startup investment is to have skin in the game yourself — to have done the work, run the numbers, talked to the founders, and decided with your own capital that it’s worth betting on.

Now I’ll tell you something I don’t talk about publicly very often, because it has nothing to do with returns and everything to do with why I get out of bed and do this. I have kids, and when I look at the world they’re going to inherit, I feel a very specific kind of urgency.

• AI is displacing entry-level jobs faster than anyone wants to admit
• College is delivering less of what it promised and more of what it costs
• Housing is unaffordable for an entire generation
• The conventional financial path is showing cracks that won’t repair themselves

The people who are going to be okay in the world that’s coming are not the ones who played it safe. They’re the ones whose parents and grandparents made decisions today that set them up tomorrow — decisions that didn’t just change a portfolio balance, but changed the entire trajectory of a family.

That’s the legacy I want to leave for my family. And I want that for you too — not just returns on a spreadsheet, but a decision that outlives you, one your great-grandchildren feel the effects of long after you’re gone. The most direct, most respectful-of-your-time way I know how to help you get there is what I’m about to hand you right now.

Here’s what most people reading this are going to do: they’re going to wait. They’ll read everything I’ve laid out and find a reason to hold off — to watch a little longer, until things feel more certain, until some external signal tells them the moment is right. And by the time that signal arrives, clearly and unmistakably, the window will already be closing.

The people who made life-changing returns on Amazon didn’t make them by buying the stock the day it went public in 1997. They made them by being in the deal before the public ever heard of it — and the difference between those two entry points isn’t a matter of degree, it’s a matter of kind. Google’s early angels saw returns of over 16,000% before it ever hit a public exchange. Facebook’s earliest private investors turned every dollar into roughly $2,000 by the time the IPO opened — while the people who bought on IPO day watched the price drop for over a year. And with SpaceX, the window for the kind of return that changes a family’s trajectory wasn’t the IPO that’s coming — it was the rounds that happened a decade ago.

So let me ask you directly. The next SpaceX is out there right now — somewhere in America, a founder is building something that’s going to matter enormously, raising capital in an environment where the institutional money has pulled back and the deals that would normally never reach an everyday investor are sitting right on the table. The question isn’t whether that opportunity exists. I know it exists, because I’m looking at deals like it every single week.

The question is whether you’re going to be the person who gets in at the beginning — before the crowd, before the institutional money comes back, before the price reflects what’s being built — or the person who reads about it three years from now and wishes they’d paid attention when the window was open.

After nearly a decade inside this world — after the wins that validated the system and the losses that refined it, after sitting across from founders who built extraordinary things and founders who didn’t — I took everything I actually use, every filter, every signal, every question I ask before I write a single check, and compressed it into its essential core.

Eight pages. Not a 300-page book, not a 12-week course, not a theoretical framework built for an audience that has never written an angel check with their own money.

And here’s why that number should excite you. The biggest difference between investors who do well and ones who don’t isn’t knowledge — it’s the ability to act with clarity and conviction when a deal is in front of them. The enemy of that clarity isn’t too little information. It’s too much of it — an overwhelming pile of frameworks and competing signals that turns a ten-minute decision into a paralysis that lasts while the deal closes without you. What I built is the direct antidote to that paralysis.

This is what the Angel Advantage Playbook contains:

None of this is theory, none of it is borrowed from a textbook, and none of it was built by someone who’s never had their own money in a deal that didn’t work out. Every piece came from being inside this world, making decisions with real capital, for nearly a decade, across more than 35 investments.

But here’s the thing: a system without deals to run it on is just words on a page. That’s why I’m including something else entirely — something that completes the loop between knowing how to evaluate a deal and actually having deals worth evaluating.

Deal Digger is the platform I personally use to find pre-IPO startup opportunities before they hit mainstream platforms — the tool that surfaces deals before the crowd arrives, before valuations reflect the attention that’s coming, and before the entry points that exist today get compressed by the wave of capital the SpaceX IPO has already begun sending into this space.

So why is a decade’s worth of real-world experience plus a deal-finding platform priced at $29?

A fair question. I have three honest answers.

The window I’ve been describing has a timeline. It’s real, it’s measurable, and it’s running on two clocks simultaneously.

Both clocks are running whether you’re paying attention or not. The founders raising right now won’t wait for you to feel ready. And now that the SpaceX IPO has landed and every financial publication is explaining what pre-IPO investing is, the quiet advantage of already knowing — already having the framework, already having the platform running, already having made your first moves — is disappearing into the noise fast.

Let me leave you with something I’ve been thinking about since I started writing this. Every story of generational wealth I’ve ever encountered has the same quiet detail buried near the beginning: a moment where one person, before anyone around them understood what they were looking at, made a decision that felt uncertain, that didn’t come with guarantees, that required them to act before the crowd arrived and the window closed.

Not a perfect decision. Not a decision made with complete information. Just a decision, made at the right time, by someone who had done enough work to recognize what they were looking at and enough conviction to act on it. That’s how legacies start.

So the decision in front of you isn’t really about whether to spend twenty-nine dollars. It’s about whether you’re going to be the person in your family who paid attention when the window was open — who had the framework ready when the deals arrived, who had the platform finding those deals before the crowd did — or the person who saw it coming, waited, and spent the years after it closed explaining all the sensible reasons the timing wasn’t quite right.