We get asked this more than anything else. Sometimes it comes as a direct question: "What do you look for?" More often it comes embedded in a pitch or an intro email, with founders trying to reverse-engineer our criteria so they can frame their company accordingly.
This post is a direct answer. Not a marketing version of our criteria, but the actual questions we're asking ourselves when we evaluate a company. Use it however is useful.
What We Look For
Founder-Problem Fit
This is the first thing we evaluate, and it's often the most important. Why is this founder the person who should be solving this problem? Not "why is this problem important" and not "why is now the right time"—why this specific person.
The answer can come from many places: direct experience with the problem (they worked in the industry, they lived the pain personally), unusual access to information or relationships that others in the space don't have, a technical background that's specifically suited to the solution approach, or a combination. What it can't be is "I'm passionate about this space." Passion is fine. It's not sufficient.
We've backed founders with no prior industry experience who had exceptional customer empathy and a novel approach. We've backed domain experts who understood their market so deeply that no one else could realistically compete with their access. The form varies. The substance—a genuine, specific reason why this person is better positioned than most to solve this problem—is consistent across every company we've backed.
A Problem That's Actually Broken
Not a problem that could be better. Not a problem that would be nice to solve. A problem where the current situation is genuinely unacceptable to a meaningful number of people who are willing to pay for something better.
The test we use: is anyone already working around this problem with improvised, inefficient solutions? Spreadsheets where software should be. Expensive consultants doing work that should be automated. Processes that everyone knows are ridiculous but that no one has fixed because fixing them requires taking on risk. When we see those patterns, we believe the problem is real.
Markets where no one is doing anything workaround-ish usually mean one of two things: either the problem isn't as acute as it seems, or the timing isn't right yet. Both matter.
Early Evidence of Customer Pull
We don't need revenue at pre-seed. We do need something. A customer who's actively using a prototype and telling you exactly what's wrong with it. A letter of intent from someone who's not your friend. A waiting list where people signed up without being asked twice.
Evidence of customer pull is different from evidence that people think the idea is interesting. Interesting is free. Pull requires that someone is spending time, money, or political capital to get access to your thing. The bar for "pull" at pre-seed is low. But it has to be above zero.
A Credible Path to a Large Outcome
We're a venture fund. We need to generate returns that justify the risk premium of early-stage investing. That means we're only looking for companies that could, in a positive scenario, become genuinely large businesses. Not every company needs to be a billion-dollar outcome. But it needs to be able to get to a size that makes the bet worthwhile given the failure rate of the asset class.
We don't need you to have this figured out completely at pre-seed. We do need to see a plausible logic for how the company gets from here to there. The best version is when the path is evident from the structure of the problem and the market—not from a financial model, but from the underlying dynamics.
What We Don't Look For
A Perfect Deck
We've passed on beautiful decks from founders who weren't ready and invested in rough decks from founders who clearly understood their business deeply. The deck matters because it communicates, not because it impresses. We can tell the difference.
A Complete Team
Two-person founding teams are fine. Solo founders are fine with the right explanation. "We're still figuring out the team" is less fine, but we can work with it if everything else is compelling. What we need is clarity about what the founding team can do and honest acknowledgment of where the gaps are.
Certainty About the Business Model
At pre-seed, we expect the business model to evolve. We're not looking for a proven revenue model. We're looking for a founder who has thought seriously about how the business makes money and can articulate a credible initial hypothesis. "We'll figure it out" is not a hypothesis. "We think it's SaaS with a land-and-expand motion because here's what we've seen from early users" is.
The single most common reason we pass on companies isn't the idea or the market. It's that we can't get confident in the founder's self-awareness and intellectual honesty. We need to believe we can have hard conversations with this person for the next several years.
The Honest Practical Stuff
We write checks of $250K to $1M. We typically lead or co-lead at pre-seed and participate in syndicates at seed. We're based in Austin but back founders across the US. We invest across all sectors with a handful of exceptions noted elsewhere on this site.
If you've read this and you think you fit, email us: [email protected]. Keep it short—two or three sentences about what you're building and why you're building it. That's enough to start a conversation.
