Most investment criteria are written to sound impressive. Here is ours, including the parts that make us look narrow.
Founders spend hours decoding what a firm wants. That is time taken from the business, and the answer is usually simpler than the website suggests. So here is ours.
We fund people who know something specific
The strongest first meetings involve a founder explaining a detail about their industry that we did not know and cannot easily verify. A billing quirk in hospital systems. Why freight brokers pay late. That kind of knowledge is hard to acquire quickly, which makes it durable.
We are cautious about markets that only exist in a deck
If the market size calculation requires three assumptions stacked on each other, we tend to pass. Not because the number is wrong, but because a founder who needs that arithmetic usually has not found a customer who is already paying for a worse version of the thing.
We care how you handle being wrong
In diligence we push on the weakest part of the business, hard. The point is not the answer. It is watching whether the founder updates, defends, or deflects. All three are informative. Only one of them predicts a good decade together.
Things that do not move us
- Logos of advisors who have never seen the product.
- A round that is oversubscribed before the product has users.
- Press coverage in the absence of retention.
- A pedigree without a reason to care about this particular problem.
None of this makes us right. Plenty of companies we passed on are doing well, and we keep a list of them where the whole team can see it. But founders deserve to know the filter before they spend a month getting through it.