“I think about the cap table as like a living room. It's like people move in, they rarely move out.” Byron Ling · How I Invest with David Weisburd

I actually really love it when they truly just say, I actually don't know. And there's two things that can happen. They'll say, I'm actually going to go figure that out. And I'm going to come back to you in five hours and tell you. But I would say the more common thing is, it's okay if they don't know. I want to hear how they're going to approach the problem. They will inevitably face all these product and customer problems that they have to solve. And so, much of what we're trying to do at the earliest stages is say, how good of a problem solver are you? And I think communication is a big part of that.

One of the things that's coming up over and over between the GP and LP layer is this authenticity and vulnerability and really getting to know you because LPs are going to be invested in you for at least 10 years. Here, you could argue it's a similar timeline. Is that also a great leading indicator when a founder is just very authentic with why they're doing something, even if not every part of the story may be the most flattering thing about themselves?

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You seem to have this understanding of exactly what kind of founder you're looking for. This excellence. How many meetings? That take you to get to understanding what excellence looks like.

We've probably met about 30,000 founders so far in the last 10 or 12 years, just having been focused on pre-seed and seed. So it's a very high volume. It's an evolving muscle. It's sort of like you're just trying to get better at it every single day. One of the challenges is you make these commitments with these founders very early, but it can take seven to 15 years, sometimes pretty quickly if it's not working. And so you're constantly trying to pattern match things in the past while also making that new investments that are going to take another five to 10 years. Just having a base of thousands of meetings, starting to see the difference between excellent and good, gives you this foundation for some of these traits to assess very quickly. I still think you need to spend a lot of time with founders. There's no substitute. I don't think there's any shortcut to sort of coming up with this judgment.