![]() ![]() The second type of entrepreneur will answer questions when they can, but when they don’t know, they say so. Whenever we try to address potential risks, they tell us they don’t exist. What will cause customer churn in three years. So they’ll make sure they have a definitive response always, even if they shouldn’t. The first thinks they’re expected to know the answer to every question. We’re always meeting the same two types of entrepreneurs. Did you skip spring break to pursue a long-term project? Did you work while you were in school? Have you built anything that took months of heads-down crunch mode to make possible? ![]() When we consider working with you as a founder, we look for your willingness to make these tradeoffs earlier in your life and career. The most successful entrepreneurs are willing to sacrifice in the short term for long-term impact. Being a founder is a constant, grueling exercise in deferring happiness and victory. But there are a few other things we haven’t seen written about or discussed enough that end up mattering a lot: Then there’s all the typical stuff: integrity, credibility, market understanding, learning ability, etc. This is an exceedingly rare set of skills - and it’s what we seek to find in every founder conversation we have. You have to be able to draw it yourself and execute at the same time. You can’t wait for someone to hand you a roadmap. You have to overcome inertia, have an unbelievable amount of conviction, and be willing to drive through brick walls. To mix our metaphors, before a founder starts building their castle, they have to make sure they’ve picked the right piece of land.īuilding an enduring company is ridiculously hard. First-party retailers are valued very differently from third-party ecommerce sites. SaaS companies have a different range of opportunities than on-premise software makers. Let’s say you win the whole thing - is the prize worth winning? The game is long and hard, and some markets are more rewarding than others. Third, we take a close look at the market you’re going after. As an extension of this, we want to see creative thinking around go-to-market strategy as well as product. That’s one of the strongest data points you can offer. If there are people using your product or service who wouldn’t know what to do without you, we want to hear about it. We reached out to the company and invested. Several years ago, we heard a handful of the founders in our community raving about a new business intelligence tool called Looker. Second, if you have a product in market, a small group of passionate early customers is a strong indicator for us. What do you understand about a market or a need that no one else does or that other companies in the space get wrong? And why is your company the most likely to win at addressing this gap? We’ve invested in every round since.Above all, we look for compelling and contrarian insight into how the world works. We were lucky enough to write them their first check when they pivoted to fintech and launched Brex, then helped place three of their first engineers. ![]() We spent hours working with and learning from them as they explored different directions, including the thrilling but short-lived Veyond VR phase. We were amazed by their curiosity, desire to learn, and ability to devour information and iterate on ideas. ![]() Pedro and Henrique were in full explore and learn mode-focused on finding the right next idea to build an incredible company around. That’s when we first met them-or, actually, that’s when a few engineers we knew at Harvard told us we had to drop everything and meet these two engineers from Brazil. They sold their first startup,, to go to Stanford in 2016. (Both were recipients of Apple patent infringements along the way, but that’s a different story.) By the time they met, when they were 16, Pedro had already built software to make Siri speak in Portugese and Henrique had started a video game company. Henrique and Pedro were coding and launching companies in their teens. ![]()
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