Company Profile · Venture Capital
Jordan Wan spent ten years staffing the sales teams of a thousand startups. Now he invests in the founders before they have one - and helps them figure out how to sell.
Most venture pitches to founders sound the same. There is the money, and then there is the promise of help - introductions, "value-add," a seat at the table. Jordan Wan built CoFound Partners on the theory that the promise is where almost everyone is bluffing. He spent roughly a decade recruiting salespeople for startups before he ever raised a fund. The help he offers is the one he can actually deliver: how to sell.
CoFound Partners is a pre-seed and seed venture firm, founded in 2019 and headquartered in New York, with a footprint that also reaches San Francisco and Denver. It backs early-stage B2B founders - the SaaS, vertical-AI, enterprise and developer-tools, and healthcare companies that tend to have a product long before they have a repeatable way to put it in front of buyers. Wan, the firm's founder and general partner, describes the target as founders "who envision futures that feel impossible today." The unglamorous corollary is that someone has to sell those futures to a first paying customer.
There is a familiar argument in early-stage investing that at day zero, product is the risk. CoFound leans the other way. Its stated purpose - repeated across its own materials and third-party profiles - is "helping founders build a repeatable sales motion." Not a deck, not a board ritual: a motion. The order in which a company figures out who to hire, what to charge, which partner to sign, and how to close the second and third deal after the founder-led first one.
That framing is not marketing borrowed from an operator's playbook. It is the operator's actual resume. Before CoFound, Wan founded CloserIQ - later renamed Formative Search Partners - a go-to-market-focused recruiting firm that, by its own account, helped staff sales teams for more than a thousand startups across a decade, "from seed to IPO." When his advice to a founder is about pricing, partnerships, or who the third sales rep should be, it is drawn from having watched that hire go right and wrong a thousand times.
Wan's route into venture is unusual enough to be a thesis in itself. He holds both a bachelor's and a master's in computer science from MIT. He spent nearly five years at the macro hedge fund Bridgewater Associates in trading research and strategy, then moved into go-to-market roles at the healthcare-appointment company Zocdoc and the insurer Oscar Health - two businesses whose entire challenge was getting a complicated product into ordinary hands. Recruiting came next, and investing after that. Every stop circled the same problem: distribution of something complex.
A pre-seed firm's scoreboard is not its own follow-on rounds - it is who shows up afterward. On that measure CoFound has done well. Its early investments include ChartHop, Garner Health, and Grow Therapy, companies that went on to raise from firms such as Sequoia and Founders Fund. Across the wider portfolio - roughly 31 companies over seven years - later rounds have drawn in a16z, Union Square Ventures, and Tiger Global. The concept fund that started it all reported a 2.7x MOIC across its early investments.
CoFound did not begin as a $15M institutional vehicle. It began as a "concept fund" - effectively a pilot - run alongside an AngelList syndicate that let accredited investors co-invest deal by deal. Only after that lean version proved out did the firm raise its institutional fund, roughly $15M, writing initial checks of around $100K. It is a founder's own advice applied to fund-building: ship the pilot, prove the motion, then scale the platform.
The economics underneath are ordinary venture: capital from limited partners, invested for equity, earning fees and carried interest on returns. What is less ordinary is the size of the operation relative to its reach. CoFound runs lean - a small team of a founder, a venture partner, an investor focused on deep tech and AI, and a handful of advisors, around eleven people in total. The syndicate stretches check size when a deal warrants it.
Alongside Wan, CoFound's team page lists Libby Fidel, an investor focused on deep tech and AI who previously worked at a venture studio for advanced manufacturing, compute, energy and quantum technology, and at CBRE's healthcare advisory team in London. The firm also names a venture partner and several advisors. It is a structure that trades headcount for closeness - the kind of firm where a founder texts the GP rather than waiting for a quarterly board meeting.
CoFound occupies the operator-led, go-to-market corner of pre-seed and seed - the same neighborhood as firms like Homebrew, Uncork, Boldstart and Susa, and the swarm of AngelList-based syndicates and solo GPs backing early B2B founders. It sits below the large seed platforms like First Round and Y Combinator in check size, and its differentiation is narrow on purpose: not a broad "we help with everything," but a specific, provable "we help you sell." In a market where every investor claims to add value, CoFound's edge is that its founder can name the value and has the decade of receipts to back it.
For a founder, the pitch is legible in a way most venture pitches are not. The money is small and early. The help is one thing, done deeply. And the person offering it has spent his career on the exact problem that tends to kill good products before anyone notices the product was good. CoFound is a bet that at day zero, knowing how to sell is worth as much as the check - and that the two are better delivered together.