Alexandra Cowie

Origin Story: In a couple sentences, how would you describe your path to becoming an investor?

Good Friends was founded by the founders of Warby Parker, Harry's and Allbirds (Neil Blumenthal, Dave Gilboa, Jeff Raider, and Joey Zwillinger). They had been angel investing for the past few years and are also good friends themselves, and believed themselves to be very fortunate to have access to many kind and smart individuals who helped them along their journey of building their businesses. They decided to formalize and institutionalize their investing efforts into a fund where they could provide high impact, strategic advice to founders (& new good friends!), and give back to the founder community in a meaningful way.

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Investment Approach: What are the key factors you consider when evaluating a founding team?

At Good Friends we look for founding teams that will run through walls and get things done, communicate the bigger vision and impact of their business, and understands / empathizes with their core customer and the pain point they are solving for.

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What's your style and approach when it comes to working with founders post-investment? What are the characteristics of founders you've worked well with?

At Good Friends we try to be as helpful as we can and provide our portfolio company founders (and our Good Friends) with access to our network of experts. That approach tends to vary from company to company; we have some who prefer more hands on strategic discussion regularly with our team and network, and others who prefer to direct more pointed questions and asks on an as-needed basis. We will work around our founders to provide the most impact to them in whatever capacity is best for them! We also have a regularly scheduled 'Office Hours' that we provide for our network of founders where we dive into relevant and pertinent topics on our founders' minds and do an open Q&A with our Partners and some industry experts in our network.

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If I'm coming to pitch to you, what's the one piece of advice you'd give me?

We want to know you as a person. What makes you excited and truly passionate about the business you're building?

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As an angel investor, how many deals do you aim to do each year?

30-40

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How would you describe your own personal mission and values, and how do they impact the way you invest?

We aim to be good friends to each other, the founders and teams that we invest in, and our partners and investors who trust us as stewards of their capital. Good friends are present, loyal, honest, trustworthy, dependable, respectful, supportive, accountable and fun--we strive to be all these things to each other, to our founders, and to our investors. This philosophy of being a good friend also applies to doing good to the consumer; whether that entails providing consumers access to a better quality product or service, superior pricing, enhancing access, or re-building an entire industry from scratch where the consumer has largely been ignored. It comes down to being a good friend!

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What do you like best about investing in NYC, and what’s your outlook on the future of NYC tech?

NYC is the hub for community, innovation and diversity and we are constantly amazed by the caliber of incredible people we have the opportunity to meet everyday who are trying to meaningfully solve today's biggest problems.