I've been a small time investor for decades and would usually be the one to handle hard tech issues at the start-ups I invested in if they ran into some kind of wall (scaling, hard to find bugs). Someone (another investor) noticed that and tipped off a friend who worked for a really large fund, they hired me to do a DD job on a company in Germany and that got me my launching customer. Syndicated deals grow the network and bit by bit it became a pretty serious player. Now doing anywhere from 20 to 45 jobs per year depending on the economy.