What we look for in a technical founder
Most of what we check in a first meeting is not on the deck. Five things we look for, and why each one predicts how a company handles its first hard year.
§01They have already built the hard part once
Frontier companies fail on the problem nobody has solved yet, not on the parts that are known. We look for founders who have touched that hard part with their own hands: the controller that keeps a humanoid upright, the scheduler that keeps a GPU cluster busy, the proof that keeps a rollup honest.
A prototype is not required. A clear account of what broke, and why, usually is.
§02They can explain it to a customer in one sentence
Depth and clarity are not opposites. The founders we back can describe the system at the level of a whiteboard and, a minute later, at the level of the person who will pay for it.
§03They know which number matters this quarter
Early companies drown in metrics. Good technical founders pick the one that proves the next claim (latency, cost per task, pilot conversion) and say why the others can wait.
§04They hire people who disagree with them
The first five hires set the culture of argument. We ask who on the team has changed the founder’s mind, and about what.
§05They want help with specific things
We are engineers and operators, and we are most useful on concrete problems: an architecture review, a first enterprise contract, a key hire. Founders who arrive with a list get the most out of us.
Working on one of the hard parts above? Pitch us, and tell us what broke.