Angel Investors Hunt for Patterns, Not Pitches

John Bradley "JJ" Jackson

29 Oct 2025 • 2 min read

At Titan Angels, I look for repeating patterns that suggest a startup has the potential to scale quickly. While founders often talk about their vision, product, or market, what really stands out to me are patterns in behavior, traction, and execution. These patterns often tell me more than a pitch deck ever could.

Pattern recognition is the ability to spot recurring structures, trends, or regularities. In other words, it’s how we make sense of chaos. Humans do it instinctively; machines are now learning to do it through artificial intelligence. Both rely on the same principle: identifying what has worked before and anticipating what might come next.

How It Works in Investing

Human pattern recognition: Our brains automatically match new information with past experiences. When I meet a founder, I unconsciously compare them to hundreds of others I’ve seen including their clarity of thought, their adaptability, their energy. Over time, certain traits start to repeat among the winners.
Machine pattern recognition: AI models look for patterns in massive datasets to predict outcomes like which customers might churn or which ads will perform best. Investors do something similar, just with different inputs: market signals, founder behaviors, and execution speed.

What I Look For

Patterns emerge in all parts of a startup’s journey:

Customer demand: Repeated signs of organic adoption before heavy marketing spend.
Team dynamics: Founders who attract talent again and again.
Learning speed: Teams that iterate quickly and incorporate feedback — a sure sign of scalable thinking.
Financial signals: Predictable revenue growth patterns, not random spikes.

And here’s the hard truth: not every good idea is fundable. There are many nice little businesses that serve their founders well or make a genuine social impact and that’s perfectly fine. But those ventures often don’t have the repeatable, scalable patterns that investors look for. A fundable startup must show the potential to grow exponentially, not just sustainably.

Why It Matters

Pattern recognition allows investors to:

Make sense of the noise and separating hype from habit.
Predict scalability by understanding when a business model is repeatable.
Spot outliers early. These rare founders who break old patterns to create new ones.

Ultimately, startup investing isn’t about having a crystal ball. It’s about recognizing familiar rhythms in unfamiliar contexts. Kinda like the echoes of past success playing out in new markets and technologies.

At Titan Angels, that’s what we look for: the patterns that point toward exponential potential.