I didn't go to an Ivy League school, so breaking into VC felt impossible.

Instead, I found my way through the side door. I started at Lyft during the pink mustache days, co-founded their employee syndicate, and helped 300+ employees deploy $30M into startups.

That led me to help other tech companies (Airbnb, Square, Pinterest, Stripe) build their own alumni investing communities.

Eventually, I realized my real passion was making angel investing accessible to people who aren't in the traditional VC club.

That's how Angel Squad was born.

Today, I run Angel Squad at Hustle Fund. It's a community of 2,000+ professionals learning how to angel invest. TechCrunch called us the "YC of Angel Investing."

We've deployed $30M+ together, and our members include everyone from Google PMs to airline pilots to physical therapists. Basically, anyone who wants to learn how to write $1k checks into startups.

I also write Small Bets, a weekly newsletter where I share lessons on startups and angel investing - the wins, the losses, and everything in between.

If you're curious about angel investing or just want to learn more about the startup world, let's connect.

Brian Nichols

Last week my 7-year-old and I built a math app together. No code. Done in an afternoon. Genuinely better than the games I've paid for on the App Store.

That same week, one of our GPs cut her email workload by 50% using a personal AI agent she built herself. I got the bug bad enough that I splurged on a Mac Mini.

Something has crossed a threshold. Tools like Claude Cowork and Claude Code aren't "AI helps you write emails" territory anymore. We're talking agents that take over your browser, triage your inbox, draft responses, and run tasks on a schedule while you sleep. 

I say this as someone who is decidedly not a software engineer: the theoretical just became very, very tangible.

Every major platform shift creates a new generation of massive companies - and founders are right now building the infrastructure for how AI agents browse the web, make purchases, and communicate with each other. 

Think the internet in 1995, except the entire web needs to be rebuilt for machines, not humans.

That's a lot of companies that need to get built fast.

Which, makes this one of the best windows in history to be an early-stage investor. 

When kicking around the idea for this event, I realized that this is the first generational platform shift where $1k checks are a legitimate entry point. 

You don't need to be a GP or a big-shot angel writing $100k minimums to participate. The best angels in our network started small, stacked reps, and built real networks along the way.

Those days of "you can't play unless you're already in" - they're over. So for the first time ever, I’m taking my Small Bets newsletter LIVE for an Angel Investing 101 Bootcamp. 

45 minutes. 

You’ll hear my thoughts on why now is an incredible time to be an angel, and get to watch a fundraising founder pitch Hustle Fund GP Eric Bahn live. 
 
🦞 RSVP while we have space. This one’s gonna be big: https://luma.com/t6n3x6kl

Founder of Angel Squad | I write about startups, investing, and hard-earned lessons | Small Bets newsletter

Open article: 🎥 Small Bets LIVE: Angel Investing 101 Bootcamp · Zoom · Luma by luma.com

🎥 Small Bets LIVE: Angel Investing 101 Bootcamp · Zoom · Luma

Almost 2.5x more people joined Angel Squad so far to start this year vs. last year.

That number surprised me a little.

But what surprised me more was who joined.

+ A former Major League Baseball player. 
+ A pharma professional investing on the side. 
+ A private funds lawyer whose VC clients finally convinced her to write her own checks. 
+ A robotics engineer. 
+ A Stanford sophomore. 
+ A Harvard Law-trained AI strategy consultant. 

The professions are all over the place too:

+ ML scientists and senior engineers at big tech companies
+ Fintech operators, fractional CFOs, startup lawyers
+ Product managers, UX designers, enterprise sales reps
+ Ex-Goldman analysts, ex-McKinsey consultants
+ Founders who've exited and are ready to back others

Members joined from Europe, Southeast Asia, East Asia, LATAM, MENA, Australia, Kenya, Taiwan - and nearly every region of the US.

This is what I kept hoping Angel Squad would become.

Not another room full of Sand Hill insiders passing deals to each other. 

A place where the robotics engineer and the startup lawyer and the ex-baseball player can all learn this asset class together - and actually invest alongside each other.

Oh, and don't forget the best part...they all meet our strict "no a-holes allowed" policy.

AI captured nearly 50% of all global venture funding last year. Over $200 billion.
Most people have no way to access these companies before they IPO.

Every major tech wave creates a new generation of massive companies. The internet gave us Google and Amazon. Social gave us Meta. Mobile gave us Uber and Airbnb.

We're in the middle of the next one. 

Founders are building new infrastructure for how AI agents browse the web, make purchases, and talk to each other. It's like 1995 for the internet, except the web is being rebuilt for machines, not humans.

A lot of companies need to get built. 

A lot of opportunities for early investors to get in.

The best news is that this wave is different because you don't need to be a full-time VC or write $100K checks to participate.

Most of the best investors in our Angel Squad community start with $1K-$5K checks. Learned from the reps. Built real networks along the way.

We're taking our Small Bets newsletter (55K+ subscribers) live for the first time ever. 45-minute bootcamp. 

We already have 300+ RSVPs.

I'll break down how angel investing actually works and why the timing is so good right now.

Then a real founder is going to pitch Eric Bahn, GP at Hustle Fund, on the spot. 

Shark Tank style (except Eric is super nice).

You'll watch Eric evaluate the deal in real time, and he might invest on the spot. 

Whether you're an experienced investor or you're just getting curious about the space, come hang.

RSVP below. We'll send the recording to everyone who signs up.

👉 https://luma.com/t6n3x6kl

🍋 LaunchLemonade.app | Helping non-tech SMEs build, launch, and run AI agents

AI is creating a new economic divide between those who build with it, and those who get left behind.

But winning in this new era isn’t about chasing the next big tool or output. It’s about building smarter, solving real problems, and creating value that AI alone can’t imagine.

That’s why I founded LaunchLemonade. I want to give non-technical founders, SMEs, and teams the power to build, launch, and own practical AI agents and no coding required. We make applied AI simple, human-first, and accessible for those who need it most.

12,000+ AI agents built, 500,000+ conversations, powered by real people.

My mission is to close the AI literacy gap, helping more people build the future on their terms.

Let's connect!

Cien S.

I just hit 5,000 followers on TikTok.

I know that's not a number that turns heads. But for someone with no content strategy, no posting schedule, and no viral moments… I'm genuinely proud of it.

I started posting about AI on TikTok because I wanted to reach people who aren't on LinkedIn or Twitter. The ones who are curious about AI but feel overwhelmed by it.

I have no secret.

What keeps me going? Some of those followers actually converted into users. They watched a short video, got curious, and signed up.

5,000 is small. But it's 5,000 real people who chose to follow along. And some of them took action.

I'll take that.

Cien Solon

Founder LaunchLemonade 🍋 | AI Agents by Experts

I used to wish I were a boy.

I wanted to play basketball, write like my favourite authors, own a business. I knew those were mostly men's worlds. I wanted in anyway.

And I got in. But I've been thinking about why, and the answer is ... my parents. They came to my games. They read my essays when they got published at school. My mother still reads my newsletter. When I said I wanted to start a company, they said go for it.

I didn't earn that. I was just lucky.

Women are being paid more, yes. But look at what roles, what levels, who holds the equity, who actually sits at the table. It moves slowly.

And behind every stat is someone who had the ability and just never had anyone telling her to use it.

So today I'm celebrating every woman who had that and flew. And every woman who didn't, and is still going anyway. 

And I feel lucky I get to play.

I spent the better part of a decade as a product manager in fintech.

I was good at it. I understood users, I understood data, and I knew how to get a room of engineers and stakeholders moving in the same direction. It felt like enough.

Then somewhere in the mid-2010s I was working on a product that served millions of users and the customer service team was completely overwhelmed. 

A small group of us built a chatbot. Early NLP and nothing glamorous. But it worked. 

Resolution rates improved and the pressure on the team dropped.

I remember sitting with the data afterwards and thinking, if machine learning can do this at this scale, it will eventually touch every part of how businesses make money and how people experience products.

That thought never really left me.

I stayed in fintech for a while after that. But I was watching AI the whole time, waiting for it to become something anyone could actually use.

That's what LaunchLemonade is. The thing I spent years waiting for someone else to build.

Hundreds of people marched through King's Cross last week to protest AI. Right past the offices of OpenAI, Meta, and Google DeepMind.

And I've been thinking about it ever since.

What does it actually mean to be anti-AI? Are you against the technology? The speed? The companies? What it's doing to jobs, to art, to the way we communicate?

Those are very different things. And I think the industry has been too quick to dismiss the people asking them.

There's a middle ground nobody is talking about loudly enough. Using AI deliberately, asking hard questions about who it serves, and demanding accountability for how it is being applied.

I run a content team. Some human and some of them are AI agents.

It's the most efficient team I've ever managed.

Here's how it breaks down. My humans handle influencer marketing, partnerships, and redistribution which are the relationship-driven work that needs a person. These are the things that requires reading a room, building trust, and making calls that only experience can inform.

My AI agents handle scripts, captions, copy, image generation and data analysis. The repetitive, high-volume work that used to eat hours every single day.

So the lesson here is that it's not about replacing people with AI. It's about letting humans do the work only humans can do, and letting agents handle the rest.

Before this, I was writing every caption, drafting every script, briefing every visual. The content was fine but I was the bottleneck. Now my agents produce the first draft in minutes and the amazing humans I work with shape, and amplify it.

Small team. Big output. And we're doing it using the same platform we sell.

All the zest 🍋

Everyone's rushing to hire AI agents in 2026.

And you'll likely waste money. 

How? If you skip the questions that count.

And I am not talking about "which model should we use?" Or "what vendor is best?"

These are the 5 questions that determine whether your AI agent delivers ROI, or becomes shelfware (swipe through).

Save this for your team's next AI conversation.

All the zest,

How To Hire An AI Agent In 2026

25,000 AI conversations a week. On an MVP. With a team you can count on one hand.

I'm going to be honest. Our platform have been held together with duct tape and determination.

Performance issues left, right, and centre. Code that needs migrating. Infrastructure that wasn't built for this kind of volume because we genuinely didn't expect it this soon.

And that's a beautiful problem to have.

We've taken our investment and put it exactly where it needs to go. First we are stabilising the ship. Not new features, not flashy launches. Stability. Because 25,000 conversations a week means hundreds of people trusting us with their work, and that trust has to be earned every single day.

This is the part of building a startup that nobody puts on the pitch deck. The unsexy, unglamorous work of making sure the thing actually works as it scales.

We're migrating our codebase, patching what breaks, and building the foundation for what comes next. It's messy and it's hard and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Now we just have to make the product match the demand.

Back to building.

All the zest 🍋

An article came out last week that gave me an existential crisis.

It's called The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis. Written from the future. S&P down 38%. Unemployment at 10%.

And the thing that caused it? AI working exactly as planned.

The co-author's already been on CNBC talking timelines.

I'm not sharing this to scare you. I'm sharing it because if you read this and your reaction is to switch off from AI entirely ... I think that's the wrong move.

Don't treat it as a countdown. Treat it as a push.

🔗 https://lnkd.in/eH3-dk7k

Everyone is debating whether AI will take jobs. 

But the question I keep coming back to is who gets to make money in a world powered by AI agents.

If businesses run on agents, and teams get leaner, and the same output gets produced with a fraction of the human input, where does the value go? It goes to the people who own the agents and not the experts whose knowledge trained the models. Not the customer service teams whose scripts became the training data. Not the accountants, the paralegals, the analysts whose workflows are now being automated at scale.

We built LaunchLemonade because we believe AI should be accessible to everyone, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't worried about the bigger picture.

The consumers and the experts are the ones I think about most. The people who are good at what they do and will watch it become something a well-prompted agent can replicate for pennies.

And this is what keeps me up. It's going to happen faster than most people are anticipating.


All the zest 🍋

Even your mom is talking about AI Agents. 

But most of it is noise.

Here are 5 things I keep hearing that are just wrong:

- "You need one AI that does everything" 
- "The model is what matters the MOST" 
- "AI replaces people" 

After working with hundreds of businesses building AI agents, here's what's actually working in 2026 (swipe through).

All the zest, 

Cien

5 things you are getting wrong about AI Agents

Last week I stood in the cell where Socrates was jailed before he was executed.

Everyone else was at the big sites, the columns, the temples and I had the place almost to myself.

Since learning about him, Socrates has always stuck with me. His whole thing was that he knew nothing, and that the most important thing a person could do was ask questions. He wandered Athens doing exactly that, asking questions that made powerful people look foolish in public. The official charge was corrupting the youth.

They gave him hemlock for it.

I kept thinking about that standing in his cell. 

Right now we're living through time where asking the right questions about AI is the most valuable skill most people aren't developing. Everyone wants the answers. The shortcuts. The prompts that work. Nobody wants to sit with the uncomfortable question of whether they actually understand what they're doing with these tools, or who benefits, or what they're handing over without realising it.

Socrates refused to stop asking.

That feels more relevant to me right now than almost anything else I've read about AI.

All the zest 🍋

This infographic went viral a couple of weeks ago and most people had the same reaction.

"We're so early. There's still time. Don't panic."

I understand why that feels reassuring. But it's the wrong read if you run a business.

These dots are people. And those people are your employees, your clients, your competitors. 84% of them have never touched AI in any form. The green strip at the bottom is using free chatbots, mostly as a fancier search engine. The yellow sliver is actually building workflows around it.

The businesses I work with that started early aren't talking about AI anymore. They're talking about four day weeks and leaner teams delivering the same output with less overhead.

That's what compounding looks like.

The grey is a gap that gets harder to close the longer you wait. When agents are running core business functions, and they will be, the businesses that spent this window building the muscle to work with AI are going to be structurally cheaper and faster in ways that are very difficult to compete with from a standing start.


All the zest 🍋

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Brian Nichols

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