“I look for the feeling I get around truly exceptional founders, which is more pattern than checklist. I spend as much time as I can with the best founders in the world, and after a while you recognize an obsession, a clarity of vision, and a willingness to grind that shows up before any metric does.”
“I look for founders who can tell me exactly what's broken.”
“At pre-seed, I am underwriting the person more than the idea. I look for three things: growth mindset, pace, and grit. The first two are easier to diligence than the third, but grit is what gets founders through walls when the metrics do not yet exist.”
“I look at the founder, not the spreadsheet. Their resilience, their why, and whether they can communicate the idea so I feel it. I've bet on people before they had metrics, and the ones who made it had already built something, even without funding.”
“I look for the story that drove the founder to this exact problem, because at seed the numbers are usually too thin to carry the decision. Then I test for execution velocity: can they build fast and pivot cleanly when the market tells them they're wrong.”
“I look for founders who already know their shit cold before the numbers are there: competition, customers, metrics, and exactly what they want to build next.”
“At seed, the company is almost a random walk; all we can really underwrite is the founder. I look for the person who knows the problem better than anyone alive, and who makes me believe they will not quit when the data still looks terrible.”
“At seed, the metrics barely matter because they're all fake; I'm betting on whether this founder has an earned secret, a Pied Piper pull that makes talented people follow them irrationally, and a clock rate fast enough to outlearn everyone else before the money runs out.”
“I look for coachability before anything else. The founders who become unicorns aren't the ones who show up knowing everything; they're the ones who know what they don't know and attack their blind spots without ego. I felt it immediately in the best ones — they listen, apply the feedback fully, and let the market tell them what's real instead of defending their original idea.”