I inherited startup shares I didn’t know existed and had to prove I owned them
My father’s angel investments outlived him. Untangling what I actually held took longer than selling it.
Inheritor, no prior angel-investing experience
Illustrative composite. A representative scenario built from how angel secondaries commonly play out — realistic numbers, written in the first person, not the record of a specific named person or company.
Deal snapshot
- Side
- Selling
- Sector
- Industrial software
- How acquired
- Inherited via estate
- Time to identify holdings
- ~5 months
- Sold at
- 20% below last round
- Route to sale
- Direct, via company-recommended broker
Finding out what I owned
My father had made a handful of angel investments over the years and, like a lot of people, never left a clean inventory of them. I found a stock certificate and a decade-old email while going through his files and had to start from there — emailing the company cold to ask if they had any record of an investor by his name.
Proving I had the right to sell it
Once the company confirmed the holding, I still had to establish legal standing to transact: probate documents, an executor letter, and a notarized transfer of the shares into my name before I could even begin thinking about a sale. The company's counsel was patient about it, but this alone took most of the five months.
Only after the shares were legally mine did the actual sale — which the company helped route to a broker they'd worked with before — move quickly and normally.
What I'd tell any angel investor now
Leave a list. Company name, amount invested, year, and any contact you have at the company. It doesn't need to be fancy — it just needs to exist somewhere your family will find it, because the alternative is what I went through.
What to take from this
- Establishing legal standing (probate, executor documents) to sell inherited shares can take longer than the sale itself.
- Companies are generally cooperative with legitimate estate claims, but the process is still slow.
- Leave a written inventory of your angel positions — company, amount, year, contact — for your family.
Every angel who has held a position long enough eventually faces a version of this decision. For the mechanics behind stories like this one, see the guide to how secondaries work.