Our mental model of “Founder DNA” – an oft-based term often followed by the phrase “it’s all about the people!” – is anchored in the belief that one’s underlying predispositions inform future decisions and actions. We find that these predispositions are largely shaped by one’s lived experiences (or lack thereof). It sounds obvious, but how someone behaves today is a function of what they experienced yesterday.

That said, we believe that indexing against these experiences at face value (e.g., where you worked, your role / seniority / tenure) is a crude and one-dimensional – if not outright dangerous – approach to truly understanding a founder’s underlying predispositions. Instead, we focus on how a founder processes and rationalizes their lived experiences, and believe this approach carries more predictive power than one oriented around traditional, surface-level signals. Our experiences (objects) do not exist independently of how we internalize them (intuition); they are “mere representations and not things in themselves”.

We view investors’ inability (or frankly unwillingness) to poke at founders’ predispositions as a fundamental and perpetual inefficiency in early stage investing. This is why we care so much about uncovering why a specific set of experiences compels a specific founder to build a business in a specific way – a critical input to a long-term aligned partnership between founder and investor.

We tend to categorize a given predisposition as a(n):

1. Continuation of prior lived experiences. These are founders who build a new business based on “what worked” in the past. Our goal is to validate that the “what worked” is not being conflated with exogenous factors (e.g., the macro, market cyclicality, competition, capital availability).
2. Reaction against prior lived experiences. These are founders who build in the spirit of what NOT to do. This predisposition often comes from hard-learned lessons from a prior company or role, where things didn’t work out. We believe these founders come with a healthy dose of self-awareness and reflection.
3. Application of what was taught or learned (not experienced). These are founders defined by an outsized work ethic, who often will their way into a critical market, product, or technical insight.
4. Natural inclination to build a business “correctly” based on gut. This one is especially hard to pin down, but these founders are akin to the soccer forward who instinctively finds a way to be at the right place at the right time.