• R&D risk – can this technology be built?
• Founder risk – can this team build it?
• Vision risk – can this idea become huge?
• Macro risk – will this startup win in 2030’s political, economic, and competitive climate?
• Can the founding team build and sell?
• What is driving the team’s mindset & motivation?
• They understand the market opportunity and use case better than people that have spent years in it
• But at the same time, they have a strong point of view that is contrarian to what incumbents believe
• They have a bias toward small, lean, and fast moving teams
• They have already identified the first five hires from their own networks
• They have an insatiable hunger to deliver a product that wows the customer and have a “hacker” mentality to get to early signs of product-market fit
• Growth keeps them up at night, not scale. They know scaling the business only matters if they achieve product-market fit
• Product vs. Distribution