The three jobs your investors should be doing, and how to check whether they’ll actually do them.

An investor who joins at seed may still be on your board at Series C. It’s close to irreversible, and it’s the decision founders do the least homework on.

We asked Orca Fraud co-founder and CEO Thalia Pillay, who has raised two oversubscribed rounds, how she structured her investor base…

Thalia didn’t assemble a cap table by taking cheques in the order they arrived. She structured the investor base to do more than fund the business, with three different kinds of investors brought in for three different jobs. That framing is the whole insight: money is the baseline, not the reason you picked someone.

Orca’s lead was a growth-stage fund, chosen because, as Thalia put it, they wanted to learn from the best. The investment that fund made immediately before Orca’s was TymeBank, which meant going from a major bank to a two-week-old startup: jarring for the fund, excellent for Orca. It also connected her directly with the Tyme founders, which is exactly the kind of thing a lead investor should unlock.

Alongside the lead, she assembled a community fund of strong local angels, deliberately structured so she could call a friend or call an investor when more capital was needed. The value isn’t just the money; it’s the speed and the optionality: a group of engaged angels is the difference between a quick top-up and a six-month raise you didn’t plan for.

The third group was founders of decacorns in the fraud space, brought onto the cap table specifically to de-risk the company in the eyes of everyone else. Her words: the credibility boost was enormous. When people who have already built the thing you’re building put money in, it answers the question every other investor and enterprise buyer is silently asking.

Investors spend weeks on diligence while most founders take money from people they’ve never checked. Reference-check them after the term sheet and before you sign, and ask for names beyond the curated list, including founders whose companies missed their targets; resistance to that request is itself the answer. Ask their follow-on and pro-rata policy, where they are in their fund cycle, and for specific introductions they’ve made that actually closed. Defensiveness about reasonable questions tells you how they’ll behave the first quarter you miss.

Built this way, your cap table becomes a working asset rather than a list of obligations: someone to learn from, a group who can move fast when you need capital, and names that make the next conversation easier before you’ve said anything.

Thalia’s full talk from Founder Collab Live is available to members inside the Founder Collab, where she goes further than we could cover here:

You’ll also get access to 40+ masterclasses from SA founders and operators on sales, fundraising, UX, paid media and more inside The Founder Collab.

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