Brandon Sedloff talks to Charles Hudson on pre-seed investing

Transcript

What has worked for you? What do you look for in a founder? Yeah, so part of it is. This might be a little woo, but like part of it is like approaching the process with humility and just saying like we don't actually know who's going to be a great founder, but we know what the attributes are. O1 unsurprising thing that we've learned. Is that previous zero to 1 startup experience really does help if you're going to do reset and it turns out it doesn't actually matter if the company that you worked in was wildly successful. What matters is that you've been in that zero to 1 experience and you know what you're signing up for. And this was an expensive lesson to learn. And I learned it by funding a bunch of people who'd worked at Facebook and Google and like the Fang companies. And they are without a doubt highly intelligent, highly capable people, and many of them just struggle. To do the zero to one thing, O one thing we look for is early startup experience. Like it's really important. It's not that we won't back teams that don't have it, but it's a big thing. The other thing is we're trying to assess the people, the person's leadership ability. And it's it's hard sometimes when you find people who professionally maybe haven't been given a lot of power or authority or opportunities to demonstrate leadership, but oftentimes you can find it in other elements of their life. It could be a hobby, it could be a school club, it could be their church. There's usually some area in life where they've like shown initiative and usually they've built or created something. On the outside then there's a bunch of anti patterns. So at first I'm like oh you can only fund people who have like domain expertise. When we look at our top companies, only half of them are founders who are working in an area where they had relevant recent professional experience. O it turns out that like that doesn't really matter. If they have a ton of domain expertise, then you have new areas where no one has domain expertise. There's a whole bunch of other questions we ask people about their risk appetite. So we actually hacked a recruiting, there's like a, an assessment tool that someone was using for like as a hiring tool and we hacked it. And now we have all the founders that we invest into essentially a personality assessment. As part of our jealousness process and it tells me a lot about who they are, how they make decisions and how the big one is how they deal with uncertainty. And going back to kind of what we look for, I usually look for people who maybe this is just me looking for myself and these people. I look for people who at least once stepped off the yellow brick road. At some point they did something that was like not easy or hard. And again, it's not always professional. Like we have a founder in our portfolio who moved to Japan to, to teach English, who didn't know any Japanese when you went, had never been to Japan, thought it would be an adventure. And one thing, as I tell people like, you know, starting a company is an adventure. You're going to learn a lot about yourself. And if you want a safe, easy experience, do not start company. Like that is like not what I would recommend if you want, if you want to safe easy experience. So I'm always looking for these clues that there's something in this person that will be unlocked by this experience. And then we go through a whole inventory local. What do we think is this person's superpower and how does that relate to the job to be done and starting this company? And then we have a whole battery of questions we ask about the cofounder dynamic to the extent that we we've also been very successful with solo founders as well. So we have a good chunk of our most successful companies that were started by a single person. In some cases they've added a founder and other cases they haven't. But a lot of what we're looking for is evidence that this person embraces uncertainty and that like being in an ambiguous environment isn't something that's going to scare this person off.