It wasn't a traditional pitch meeting. There were no slides, no product demo. There wasn't even a clear explanation of what the founders were trying to build. But for investor Oren Zeev's decision-making process, none of that was necessary.

"I just liked them, I just wanted to be close to them," said Zeev. "So I wrote a small check – a 'relationship investment,' I called it."

The year was 2013, and Zeev, a former general partner with the venture capital arm of Apax Partners (which now operates primarily as a private equity firm), was working as a de facto angel investor. He didn't like to call himself an angel investor because he tended to write checks that were larger than those doled out by other wealthy individuals who put their own capital into startups at the time. But he made an ex

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