Investment VP at AppWorks
Check size: Firm-level: AppWorks publishes a US$200K to US$15M per-deal range across Seed through Series C, with capacity to lead or follow and reserve capital for follow-ons. This is not Nathan's personal allocation range.
Nathan favors AI and software that hide technical complexity and remove customer friction. His product lens treats simplicity as a defensible outcome of customer obsession, opinionated design, disciplined feature choices, deep engineering, transparent pricing, and seamless integrations—not as superficial minimalism. His Southeast Asia investment and corporate-venture experience adds attention to local distribution, strategic partnerships, and scalable commercial execution.
Demonstrate the customer's core job and every point of friction in the existing journey. Show what the product deliberately removes, why the resulting simplicity requires technical depth, how AI works invisibly, and what evidence proves faster adoption, engagement, loyalty, or lower operating effort. Explain transparent pricing, essential integrations, regional distribution, and the discipline used to reject non-core features.
Customer-obsessed founders willing to say no to distracting features, invest in the hard engineering behind a simple experience, and make AI useful without making the technology the center of the product. He also values meaningful relationships and teams capable of executing across Southeast Asian markets.
No explicit pass list is public. His writing directly warns against feature accumulation, unnecessary clicks and setup, opaque pricing, convoluted integrations, technology that exposes complexity to users, and teams without the courage or discipline to focus on the customer's core need.
Trace simplicity to its hard inputs: exact user knowledge, explicit feature tradeoffs, hidden engineering depth, low-friction setup, clear pricing, seamless integration, and measurable improvement in adoption or loyalty.
Judge AI by the customer friction it removes and the outcome it improves; if users must understand or manage the underlying complexity for the feature to work, the product has not yet made AI invisible.
“Users don't actually crave more features; they crave less friction.”
— https://appworks.tw/the-power-of-simplicity/
“That's the real power of AI: when it becomes invisible, solving big problems without anyone noticing.”
— https://appworks.tw/the-power-of-simplicity/
True product simplicity is a moat built from customer obsession, disciplined subtraction, deep engineering, transparent pricing, seamless integration, and AI that solves problems without adding friction.
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