By the time a founder is sitting across from me with a pitch deck, I have usually made most of my decision already, and it has very little to do with the slides. People assume investing is about spotting the best idea. In my experience, it is mostly about reading the person holding it. The idea will change. The market will shift. The one constant is who is steering.
I am betting on the person, not the deck
A deck shows me what someone wants me to see. It is polished, rehearsed, and built to impress. That is exactly why I don’t weight it heavily. What I am really trying to understand is the human being behind it: how they think, how they respond when I push, whether they know the difference between what they know and what they are hoping. A mediocre plan in the hands of a relentless, honest founder beats a brilliant plan in the hands of someone who folds.
The kind of hunger I look for
I back hunger, but not the desperate kind. The hunger I want is specific. It is the drive to close the gap between where they are and where they intend to be. It is coachability, the ability to hear that they are wrong and get better fast. It is resilience, the capacity to take a hit and keep moving. And it is ownership, treating every outcome as personally theirs rather than someone else’s fault.
None of that shows up on a cap table. I find it by asking what they taught themselves that nobody required them to learn, and about a time they failed and what they did the next morning. The answers tell me more than any projection.
Capital efficiency tells me who they are
I pay close attention to what a founder has done with a little. Show me someone who stretched a small amount of money a very long way, and I will show you someone who understands that capital is borrowed from the future and has to be paid back in results. That instinct is character, not just skill.
The opposite worries me. A founder who has only ever operated with plenty, who treats funding as fuel to burn rather than trust to honor, has not built the muscle that survives a downturn. When the market turns, and it always turns, resourcefulness is what is left. I would rather back the person who already has it.
I am not investing in the idea on the slide. I am investing in the person who will still be standing when that idea has to change three times.
How they treat people who can’t help them
This is the test that has saved me the most pain. I watch how a founder treats the people who can do nothing for them: the assistant, the junior, the waiter, the person whose name they assume they can forget. Hunger without character is dangerous. Someone gracious only to those above them and careless with everyone else will eventually be careless with your capital, your team, and your name.
I learned this the hard way, by ignoring it once or twice and paying for it. Now it is close to non-negotiable.
Conviction over agreement
One more thing I look for, and it is subtle. I want a founder who has thought harder about their space than I have. I do not want someone who simply agrees with me. I want conviction earned from real understanding, someone who can tell me why the obvious approach is wrong and back it up. The best founders I have backed changed my mind about something in our first conversation. That is a good sign. It means that when the hard calls come, they will not just be waiting for me to make them.
The reasons I pass
I pass more often than I invest, and the reasons are usually not about the market. I pass when a founder cannot honestly tell me what they don’t know. I pass when every problem in their story is someone else’s fault. I pass when the ambition is loud but the integrity is thin, because ambition without values does not slow down, it just finds shortcuts that hurt people. And I pass when I sense they want the status of building more than the work of it.
None of these make someone a bad person. They just make them a bad bet for me, and a clear pass is fairer to both of us than a reluctant cheque.
Why I do it this way
I invest in people the way someone once invested in me. Early on, somebody looked past what I lacked on paper and bet on what I was clearly willing to do. That bet changed my life. So when I weigh a founder, I am not only protecting my capital. I am looking for the person worth handing a rope to, the one who will climb, and who will one day reach back and pull someone else up too.