Early Twitter Investor Chris Sacca Wins Crunchie For Angel Of The Year

In the year in which Twitter went public, it’s hard to bet against one of the company’s earliest and most influential investors. Which is why it shouldn’t come as a big surprise that Lowercase Capital founder Chris Sacca has won this year’s Crunchie for Angel of the Year.

Sacca put some of the earliest money into Twitter, betting on the micro-blogging platform during its Series A round of financing. But he was also instrumental in helping late-stage investors like JP Morgan and Rizvi Capital Management to accumulate a huge stake in the company through secondary sales, buying up shares from earlier investors and vested employees.

That proved to be a brilliant move, given the strength in Twitter’s stock since IPO. After pricing shares at $26, the stock popped to $45 by the end of its first day of trading. Its recent share decline notwithstanding, Twitter stock is still trading at about double its original listing price.

All of which is why Sacca edged out Baseline Ventures founder Steve Anderson, Harrison Metal founder Michael Dearing, former Square COO and current Khosla Ventures partner Keith Rabois, and AngelList founders Babak Nivi & Naval Ravikant in the category, which was presented by Google Ventures partner Kevin Rose and TechCrunch’s Josh Constine.

While Sacca’s win this year is mostly due to his involvement in Twitter, he hasn’t slowed down investing in hot startups since then. He was also an early investor in Uber, Twilio, and Instagram, for instance, and more recently put money into fancy coffee shop Blue Bottle Coffee and Ev Williams’ new publishing platform Medium.