In venture capital, uncertainty is the only certainty.

At the seed stage, revenue is often non-existent. Product-market fit is more of a journey than a destination. And even with all the right signals, it's incredibly difficult to determine if a problem is painful enough to drive behavioral change.

This is why we anchor ourselves to the one constant in every early-stage company: the founder. More things will go wrong than you can imagine, and we need founders who can overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges.

Ground Truth > Growth Hacks: What Makes a Founder Backable

In our experience, it comes down to two core elements: proof of successful execution and unique market ground-truths.

• Living the problem, not just solving it

Some founders don't just see the market; they live it. Take the founder of ApniBus, who operated buses for a year, to experience firsthand the pain points in the industry. This level of commitment - what we call "learning by doing" - often leads to insights that can't be gleaned from market research alone.

• Contrarian thinking, clear vision

The strongest founders we've backed demonstrate an almost contrarian understanding of markets and human psychology. They can clearly articulate what has come together to make now the right time to build it. They've identified existing user behaviors that can be served via technology, and they have a clear, often unique perspective on narrowing into a problem.

• Iteration > Perfection

What truly excites us are founders who bring a fresh perspective to age-old problems. Success at the early stage rarely comes from getting everything right the first time. Instead, it comes from having the grit to iterate until you find what works, the humility to learn from failures, and the leadership to maintain team morale through multiple iterations.

Building Investor Conviction through Transparency

What's also important is how founders engage with potential investors. The strongest founders we've worked with bring investors into their journey early - sharing their assumptions, ideating openly, and providing informal updates on as learnings evolve. This isn't about creating FOMO, but instead building genuine conviction by exposing investors to their thought process firsthand.

• Clarity of thought stands out

Even in highly competitive markets, we look for founders with a clear, often contrarian, point of view. These founders understand the trade-offs their approach demands and can articulate why their unique perspective—whether in product, go-to-market, or operations—gives them an unfair advantage.

• Actions speak louder than track records

For first-time founders, we know the odds can seem daunting. While track records matter, we're not exclusively focused on repeat founders. It’s often the smaller actions that create an exponential difference in determining eventual success. What might seem like a mere 20% difference in time spent interacting with customers on the ground, can translate into a 20x difference in the outcome. That's why we look for:

1. Deep domain expertise

2. Early signs of execution capability

3. The ability to demonstrate consistent progress and learning

The strongest first-time founders we've backed share one common trait: they're in our inbox every month without fail, showing progress, sharing learnings, and demonstrating their ability to execute. They find ways to bootstrap to early signs of PMF or successful pilots, letting their execution build the conviction that their track record hasn't yet had the chance to demonstrate.

In the early days of a startup, almost everything is a variable - supply, demand, product, and market dynamics. The founding team is often the only known quantity.

Quotable

"If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late." - Reid Hoffman, Co-founder of LinkedIn