We see hundreds of pitch decks every year. Every one of them has a market size slide. Every one of them has a competitive landscape matrix. Every one of them has a revenue projection that inflects up and to the right at some point in years two or three. These slides are necessary, and we look at them carefully, but they are not what ultimately drives our investment decisions.
Our investment decisions are driven by the founder. The deck tells us about the market and the plan. The founder interview tells us whether this is a person we want to spend the next ten years working with, and whether this person has the specific combination of qualities that makes it possible to build something genuinely new. This piece is an attempt to articulate what those qualities are and how we try to identify them.
Proprietary Insight vs. Borrowed Narrative
The single most important thing we listen for in a founder conversation is the presence of a proprietary insight: something the founder knows or believes about the market, the technology, or the user that is not already widely understood, and that this founder is uniquely positioned to act on.
Proprietary insights are qualitatively different from borrowed narratives. A borrowed narrative is a compelling market thesis assembled from analyst reports, industry conferences, and blog posts. Many founders have excellent borrowed narratives. They can explain why their market is large, why the timing is right, and why their solution addresses the key unmet need. All of this may be true. But it is not proprietary. Everyone with access to the same sources could have reached the same conclusions.
"The founders we back can usually tell us something about their market that we did not know before the conversation started. That is the signal we are looking for."
A proprietary insight typically comes from one of two sources: deep technical expertise that reveals a solution that was not previously possible, or deep user empathy that reveals a problem that was not previously visible. In both cases, the founder has access to information that the market has not yet priced in. That information asymmetry is the core of what we are investing in.
Coachability Without Capitulation
The best founders are simultaneously highly coachable and deeply resistant to pressure to abandon their core conviction. This sounds like a contradiction. It is not.
Coachability means being genuinely open to new information, willing to update your view when presented with evidence that challenges it, and able to distinguish between feedback that is analytically sound and feedback that reflects the advisor's preferences rather than objective reality. Coachable founders learn faster, make better decisions, and are more pleasant to work with over the long term.
Resistance to capitulation means being able to hold your core conviction about the problem and the approach under sustained pressure from investors, advisors, customers, and the general market noise that will always exist to tell you that you are wrong. The line between being appropriately stubborn and being pathologically inflexible is real but subtle. The founders who navigate it well tend to be those who have a very clear internal model of what they know from first principles versus what they are still testing.
Relationship With Failure
We ask every founder about their failures. Not because we expect confessional revelations, but because the way a founder talks about failure tells us a great deal about how they will navigate the inevitable setbacks of company building.
The founders who worry us most are those who have a clean, polished answer to this question that positions their failures as unambiguous growth experiences from which they emerged stronger and wiser. This narrative is too tidy. Real failure is messy, disorienting, and expensive, not just financially but emotionally. Founders who have genuinely processed a significant failure have usually developed a more complicated relationship with it than the growth story allows.
The founders who give us the most confidence are those who can speak honestly about what went wrong, what their specific contribution to the failure was, what they still do not fully understand about why it happened, and what they carry forward from the experience. That kind of honest relationship with failure predicts a capacity for honest self-assessment that is invaluable in the chaos of early-stage building.
Why They Are Doing This
The last thing we try to understand is why the founder is building this specific company at this specific moment, rather than doing something else with their time and energy. The answer to this question is not a formality. It is one of the most predictive signals we have found.
Founders who are building because they have identified a large market opportunity and believe they can generate a significant financial return are not wrong to think that. But in our experience, they are unlikely to have the specific type of endurance that seed-stage company building requires. The rewards are too distant and too uncertain for financial motivation alone to sustain the required effort through the difficult periods.
The founders we believe in most are those for whom this specific problem is genuinely compelling in a way that transcends the financial calculus. They are building because they cannot imagine doing anything else, because the problem they are working on feels urgent and personal and important in a way that goes beyond the business case. That depth of motivation is not a guarantee of success. But in our experience, it is a prerequisite for the kind of persistence that great companies are built on.
This is what we are looking for beyond the pitch deck. We do not always find it. But when we do, we move quickly, because the founders who have it rarely stay un-backed for long.
