FKA The Operator Fund
About The Fund
The Autopilot Fund is a bet on startup dynamism, that weāre still in the early innings of unlocking productivity in the workplace. It is led by Hari Raghavan and Adam Spector.
We focus on early-stage companies that serve and accelerate how companies operate. This spans various ādepartmentsā: could be in engineering, operations, sales, finance, product, customer success⦠the questions we ask ourselves are:
- Is this a founding team so capable that others should be afraid to go against them?
- Do they understand the problem better than anyone, and have special āfounder-marketā fit?
- Will they rest until they have dragged the world kicking & screaming into their vision of the future?
- Is the product āinfrastructureā in a manner of speaking: structured data, deeply embedded, sticky?
- Does the advent of AI exponentially increase or decrease their defensibility?
Our portfolio includes some pretty special companies like AngelList, Pulley, Puzzle, Levels, Disco, among others; and weāre lucky to count elite investors and operators as LPs (Naval Ravikant, Elizabeth Yin, Jared Fliesler, and dozens of others).
Please reach out to team@autopilot.fund if you have any questions!
About the GPs
In our angel investing days spanning 2013-2021, we invested in
- 70+ early-stage rounds and
- 30+ late-stage rounds / secondaries
We were Seed / Series A investors in Gingko Bioworks, Relativity Space, Notion, Checkr, BetterUp, Mercury, Human Interest, Rippling, and On Deck. We've also served as startup founders and execs many times over, so we understand that journey better than most!
We hope to bring that track record to bear to build a fund ā and most importantly, to do whatever is in our power to enable entrepreneurs, with a spirit of service. We like to think we're high {help} / {$ invested} š.
How We Invest
We don't do pitch calls; we do brainstorming calls.
So, our 25-40 minute calls might look a little different than your usual pitch:
- 5-10 mins of mutual context on you + what you're building
- 2-3 minutes of context on the round
- The rest of the call is brainstorming product strategy, GTM strategy, or whatever else you want. Pick any topic that is a burning issue, that you'd like to talk through.
At the end of the call, we do one of three things:
- We politely decline because itās not a fit
- We commit on the spot to our typical check of $10-20K
- In very rare cases, where we feel we feel particularly strongly about the team / space / problem, weāll ask to dig in for a larger check of $50-100K.
If we've done our job ā whether or not we invest ā you'll a) feel excited, not drained coming out of the call, and b) have additional feedback, ideas, connections, or other food for thought.