Over the past four years we have written ten investment memos and turned down somewhere north of nine thousand. The decisions are easier to make than to articulate. What follows is an attempt at articulation — a working list, kept on a single page in a shared notebook, of the traits we have learned to recognize and the traits we have learned to discount.
What we look for
A founder who has been working on the problem, in some form, for five years or more. A founder who can describe, without prompting, three failure modes of their own approach. A founder whose technical writing is clearer than their pitch deck, and who is faintly embarrassed by the deck. A founder who answers every question with the version of the truth that is hardest to defend, because the easier version would be a lie of omission.
A founder who has, somewhere in their history, been told that the way their mind works is a problem. A founder who has come to suspect that the people who told them that were wrong.
What we discount
Polish. Pedigree. Eloquence in the first meeting. Demos that work suspiciously well. Founders who have already optimized their narrative for our slide template. None of these are disqualifying; all of them are uncorrelated with what we have come to believe matters.
We are not contrarian for its own sake. The traits we look for are not the opposites of the traits we discount; they are simply orthogonal to them. A polished founder can be a deep one. A pedigreed founder can be a patient one. We are only saying that the surface is a poor proxy, and the work of looking past it is the work of the firm.