Courtland Goldengate, Angel Investor

I invest pre-seed, advise startups, and lead go-to-market teams. I tend to think differently. When presented with A or B, I often wonder why we aren’t thinking about C, or why we’re talking about letters when we should be talking about numbers. As an investor, I’m most interested in markets positioned to outperform in a changing world, but in a way that is less obvious or over-exploited. More general areas of interest include AI, developer tools, cybersecurity, and any software that can help people be more data-driven. As an operator, I’ve helped grow 4 startups to acquisitions totaling $9.3B, and 2 IPOs totaling $16B. I’ve led all marketing functions, sales development, inside sales, sales operations, and BI. I’ve hired and managed well over 100 people, and seen them go on to be successful CEOs, investors, CMOs, VPs of demand gen, software engineers, sales leaders, and more. My leadership style started out as being hypercritical of things that were “being done wrong” and pushing for a better way. As I led larger teams and came to learn that I didn’t have all the answers, I gravitated toward servant leadership. After seeing a couple of companies struggle with consensus culture when operating at scale, I now take a more active leadership posture, advancing concrete points of view, soliciting feedback, and then making change happen.