Supporting Founders
I help founders and product leaders build the companies they want to exist. The work is about helping them become the best, spikiest version of themselves, with a product and business that reflect it.
I work with a limited number of teams annually.
How I work with founders
I coach founders and product executives, advise and invest in companies, and serve as an active, independent board member. The form depends on what the team needs.
My coaching focuses on building your product and business. For traditional executive coaching, I'm happy to make a referral.
I'm most useful in three kinds of work:
- Zero-to-one product building. Finding the first customers, testing the core idea, and deciding what to build.
- Moving from one product to several. Working out when to expand, which markets to enter, and what needs to change first.
- Business and marketplace design. Revenue models, pricing, supply and demand, and what makes the business durable.
Investment focus
I've been an angel investor since 2019. I invest across four areas: durable human systems, especially workforce and education; AI infrastructure; hard tech; and intelligence for physical systems.
AI infrastructure. The compute layer, the safety layer, the tooling that makes models useful at scale.
Prior investments: Anthropic, Groq, Haize Labs, Tensorfuse
Hard tech that reprices what's possible. Aerospace, energy, robotics, advanced hardware. Companies where an engineering breakthrough makes a previously uneconomic thing economic. Where the physics, once proven, creates a moat that software alone never will.
Prior investments: Anduril Industries, Maritime Fusion, Efficient Computer, Atomic Semi, Ursa Major Technology, Boom Supersonic, Karman Industries, Parametric, Gen1
Intelligence for physical systems. The physical world is dramatically under-instrumented. I back companies that bring software-grade data and decision-making to operations that still run on intuition, manual process, or last decade's assumptions.
Prior investments: Harbinger, Beehero, OneRail, Ponderosa.ai
Human systems: workforce and learning. This is my professional domain for the last 15+ years. I know where the gaps are: credentialing, navigation, employer-sponsored access, and skills intelligence and I invest when I see opportunities forming.
Prior investments: Rippling, Vanta, Mercury, Toucan, Solace Health
What I look for
I don't lead or price rounds but I'm comfortable being the first check in. I'm most useful, and most interested, when:
- The founding team has obvious founder-market fit and evidence of execution velocity
- The business model is legible even if early. Not hypothetical.
- There's a structural tailwind (policy, technology shift, cost curve) that makes this more likely to win over a 5–10 year horizon
- Capital is being used efficiently to reach proof points, not to paper over a missing thesis
I pass quickly and try to be direct about why.
Get in touch
If you're building in one of these domains and want to talk, reach out: chandler.koglmeier@gmail.com