Our “criteria” for investing

What do we look for when selecting an investment? Investments we want to make go beyond a checklist of “box ticking” on our non-negotiable requirements (e.g., that we trust the founders).

We do as much as possible to mitigate our own biases when investing. For us, a startup / founding team needs the potential to be more than merely great, it needs a shot at the extraordinary. The good news is that to do that, we only look for at least one reason to believe, at earliest of stages, that it can be an outlier...

Our reasons to believe a startup could be one of the greatest companies ever

Need at least one of the below compared to other great startups at the same stage

Founder(s) and team

• Ever do something singular? Record of unusual achievement
• Best-in-the-world domain experience or punch-way-above-your-weight-class first hires
• Depth of commitment to the problem ("would do this for a decade, and keep going even if funding never appeared"), especially in learning the domain
• Would you work for the team?

Product and market

• A wow of a product experience and/or extreme early growth and engagement numbers (for products adopted by individuals)
• Customers don't need to be sold, want to pay full-price immediately -> evangelists (for products adopted by companies)
• Exclusive path to customers -- distribution as a competitive advantage
• Timing -- that One Moment is clearly now

Business and economics

• Surprisingly profitable unit economics

Deal terms

• None. (Good deal terms are never a reason to invest in and of themselves.)

Important indicators