Desmond Lim, CEO of Workstream, recalled that the company's first angel check came from Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, amounting to $25,000, issued in June 2018.

The two met earlier. In June 2016, Lim had just arrived in San Francisco and interviewed Yuan as a freelance journalist. After founding Workstream, which focuses on recruiting and onboarding hourly workers, in 2018, Yuan became one of the earliest angels and handwrote the check in the San Jose office. Lim stated that Yuan has followed up with every round of investment, totaling over seven figures.

He summarized four points: first ask for advice, not money; start with friends and mentors who already believe in you; keep progress synchronized through emails or meetings; sell the founder's story and vision, not just numbers. His judgment is that the first angel often comes from the existing network.

Since then, Workstream has received funding from Founders Fund, Mark Cuban, Jay-Z, and others, raising approximately $120 million in total. In the B round, they received over ten term sheets, led by BOND and Coatue. Lim has also personally invested in over twenty startups. The company's first paying client was a Palo Alto café, where the three founders went door-to-door to sell their service.

This narrative frames the $25,000 check as an entry point for subsequent institutional rounds: establishing a two-year relationship among immigrant founders before cashing in on trust at launch.

In market mechanisms, this is about reputation capital coming first, followed by cash: small checks from publicly listed or high-growth founders reduce due diligence costs in later rounds. Beneficiaries are entrepreneurs who can convert interviews, alumni, and immigrant networks into cap tables; those under pressure are projects without updated relationships, which can only cold-start institutional seed funding. Funds enter hourly labor software from the personal account of the Zoom founder and are then amplified by growth round funds.

Public records can verify the check date, amount, and subsequent follow-on investments, but the list of the next companies he angel-invested in is not detailed in this post.

Source: Public information