Tip of the Spear: Alex Chung, Founding Growth at Goodword & Former VC

February 24, 2026

By The Artemis Fund
The Artemis Fund believes technology can create prosperity for all. With offices in New York, Texas, Massachusetts, and Nevada, Artemis leads seed rounds for companies creating resilient families, individuals, and businesses across the US.
Tip of the Spear is an interview series highlighting The Artemis Fund’s expert network. Alex Chung made the jump from venture into operating last year, joining Goodword to work on growth at an early stage. We caught up to talk about what changes when you switch sides, how her investing experience shows up in company-building, and why she believes we’re heading into a new era of “high-agency” work powered by AI tools.

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Q: You moved from investing to operating this year. What pushed you to make the leap?
A: A big part of it was the venture feedback loop. In venture, there’s so much ambiguity. You can do all the right things and still not know if you’re “good” for years. You might have a strong year in terms of activity: great sourcing, good diligence, strong relationships, smart bets. But the outcomes you’re actually judged on (whether companies break out, whether you picked the right founders, whether your conviction was correct) take four or five years to become real.
I also think there’s a psychological side of it. If you’re the type of person who likes momentum and clarity, venture can be tough because the work is productive but the validation is delayed. And you can look good “on paper” in the early innings: a company raises more money, you build a reputation, your portfolio looks healthy, but none of that guarantees you’ve built real judgment yet.
Operating is the opposite. It’s immediate. You can run an experiment, get a signal, and decide what to do next. The feedback loop is tighter, and for me that felt energizing. I wanted to build something where the work shows up in the product and the results, not just in conversations and memos.
Q: Why Goodword specifically?
A: I’d spent time around the team during their raise, and that process was a big signal. Fundraising, especially early seed, can be weird. There are moments where it looks like there might be space for angels, or the round has an awkward shape, or timelines shift. At one point, I was helping make intros, and what surprised me was how natural it felt to pitch the company.
It wasn’t like I had to force myself to be excited or convince someone of a story. It was easy because I genuinely believed it was compelling, and I could picture myself using it. That matters. There are plenty of companies that are “good” intellectually, but you don’t feel them in your bones. With Goodword, I felt it.
Then we started talking more seriously about what my role could look like and where I’d fit. It wasn’t just “come join us.” It was: what do you actually want to learn, what do you want to own, and how can we shape something that’s useful for the company and personally motivating?
Q: You work on growth. What does that actually mean at this stage?
A: Growth at an early-stage company is way broader than people think. It’s not just paid marketing or “go scale CAC.” It’s really about building feedback loops: talking to customers, understanding pain points, figuring out how the product is landing, and then translating that into positioning, onboarding, and channel strategy.
I wrote a whole document of things I wanted to do and basically said, “Can we call this growth?” because I wanted to be close to the customer and close to the product. I wanted to learn channels I hadn’t worked on before (paid, email, lifecycle) and also understand how research and product connect in practice.
Email marketing was one of the first areas I jumped into. It’s deceptively hard because you’re not just writing copy. You’re learning segmentation, deliverability, timing, tone, and what makes someone actually take the next step. I’m also learning paid, which is a totally different muscle. And then there’s activation, which is fascinating at this stage because you’re still discovering what your “aha moment” is.
There are these iconic activation metrics, like “Facebook’s 7 friends in 10 days”*, but early on, you don’t have that yet. You’re experimenting to find the behavior that predicts retention, satisfaction, and real product value. That’s where a lot of the fun is.
*Facebook found that people who added 7 friends in 10 days had much higher retention and engagement than those who didn’t.
Q: What are you focused on this week?
A: We’re publishing a research-style report on the state of human connection, almost like a “marketing McKinsey” project. The basic premise is: there’s been massive innovation in AI tools and the way people network and interact has changed a lot, but we rarely stop to ask how people actually feel about it.
So we’re launching a survey and then packaging the findings as something that’s both useful and shareable. We’re collaborating with a friend of mine who’s also a content creator to strengthen distribution, and we’re tying it to a broader campaign: content, an event, and a few smaller community moments like dinners.
We’re also running landing page experiments, testing different narratives, hooks, and “why now” framings to see what resonates. Some of it is very scrappy and experimental in the best way. That’s another big difference from venture: you can move from idea to execution really quickly, and you’re rewarded for shipping.
Q: You mentioned working with a creator. What’s been your take on influencer marketing?
A: Honestly, it’s more unpredictable than I expected. Before you do it, it’s easy to assume: I pay you, you post, it works. But a one-off post is totally different from a campaign, and it’s hard to know what you’re actually buying unless you’ve done it a few times.
There’s also sometimes a mismatch in expectations. As a company, you want to understand the output: what kind of engagement, what kind of clicks, what kind of downstream action. But creators aren’t selling performance marketing; they’re selling attention and trust, and results can vary.
What we’re trying to do is approach it like a multi-touch campaign tied to a bigger story, not a single post. It’s not about one spike, it’s about repeated exposure, building familiarity, and giving people a reason to care beyond “here’s a product that you should buy.”
Q: What feels meaningfully different about the world right now compared to a year ago?
A: The biggest shift is leverage. AI tools are changing what one person can do, how quickly they can learn, and how fast they can ship.
If I were still in venture (or when I go back), I would make it a priority to get genuinely good at these tools. Claude Code is one example. I’m actually taking a small-group class from someone I found on Twitter who went viral teaching people how to use it effectively. We meet twice a week for five weeks. It might be amazing, it might be a waste of money, but the point is, this is a real skill.
NotebookLM is another one I find really interesting. The upside for investors is huge: you can show up to a first call having already absorbed everything relevant about an industry, a market map, the competitors, and the nuance. Not in a fake way, but in a real “I did my homework” way.
More broadly, I think it’s a golden era for curious, high-agency people. If you’re someone who wants to find the answer, and you have the right tools, you can build things you never could have before. You don’t have to be an engineer to create. You just have to be willing to experiment.
Q: How has operating changed your relationship with metrics and reporting?
A: It’s completely different. In venture, reporting is periodic. You’re pulling numbers monthly or quarterly for LP updates, and there’s crunch time, but it’s bounded. You’re trying to create a clean narrative and a clean snapshot.
In operating, data isn’t a snapshot; it’s steering. You want to know what’s happening every day, sometimes every hour, because it informs what you do next. We have dashboards that show current numbers, target numbers, the delta, and the path to get there. It’s not “nice to have.” It’s how you prioritize.
You can also get more creative internally about what you track and why. For example, we intentionally ask for LinkedIn on the waitlist form. Once we have it, we can enrich a profile, assign a persona, and tailor messaging accordingly. That’s data as product strategy, not data as reporting.
Q: What’s something you understand differently now about being “helpful” as an investor?
A: Follow-through is everything. The most common unhelpful thing is offering help in theory  (“I’ll introduce you to someone,” “I’ll get you that thing,” “I’ll send that resource”) and then not doing it. It’s rarely malicious. People are overloaded, managing many companies, and their attention is split.
But from the operator side, incomplete help can be worse than no help because it creates extra cognitive load. Founders aren’t looking for promises; they’re looking for closure. Either send the intro or don’t offer it.
I also think operating makes you more empathetic to the sheer volume of decisions founders make daily. Everything competes for attention: product, hiring, fundraising, customer needs, and internal alignment. So when an investor is responsive, specific, and dependable, it stands out.
Q: What would you do differently as an investor given the lessons you’ve learned as an operator?
A: I would emphasize team even more than I already did. Not just “can they execute,” but do they have vision and endurance? You need builders who can check boxes, but you also need people who are a little unhinged. The “do whatever it takes” mentality. People who constantly think about the problem. It sounds cliché, but it’s real.
I also think stability matters more than investors talk about. And stability can mean many things: home stability, relationship stability, life stability. When someone has fewer external variables pulling at them, they can focus more deeply on building. That focus compounds.
And I’d pay more attention to whether the team is having fun. That sounds soft, but it’s actually strategic. Most days aren’t headline-worthy. They’re repetitive, demanding, and stressful. Teams who can enjoy the journey are more likely to stay resilient through the grind. Culture isn’t a vibe. It’s an operating system.
Q: I’ve been thinking a lot about seed investing with all this AI tooling. Do companies need seed capital the same way they used to?
A: I think that’s shifting quickly. It’s easier than ever to spin up an MVP, test distribution, and iterate with a tiny team. The cost of experimentation has collapsed. The “recipe” for getting to a real product looks different now than it did even a few years ago.
I don’t think it means capital goes away. But it does mean the bar changes. The expectations change. And I think the market is still figuring out what “seed-stage” even means, given that teams can get further with fewer resources.
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