Skills Founders Need to Find Funding

I think I'm an optimist at heart. This is a plug for Stanford. One of our single most successful startup companies is, I think they were maybe a year out of school, Nathan and Sophia from Peer Eyewear. Like, they're one of our most successful investments. I invested in them with relatively little professional experience outside of that company. So a couple things. I don't really care about professional experience. My basic belief, having invested now in hundreds of founders, you don't actually know who's going to be a good CEO and founder until you put them in the job. You can try to extract it. Oh, this person managed 100 people at Google. You don't know. Being a CEO is a really different. And founder, it's a really different job. You have to do a lot of things you've probably never done before. Hiring, firing, raising money, setting strategy, and like, the buck stops with you. So I'm an optimist. I'm like, I'm going to bet on the people that I think will grow into that role when given the opportunity. So we invest in a lot of people for whom it's their first time being a founder, and many of them are within a couple of years of graduation from school. So that's one second. The big thing I'm looking for is some level of comfort. And this is kind of hard to test for with ambiguity because a lot of the early, maybe the first two years of startup life, when I look at the teams that either quit or get frustrated or don't make it, it's usually like the inability to sit with this, like, ambiguity around startup. You're trying to find product market fit and you don't have it yet. You're close and no one else can tell you what to do. And the third one is the ability to tell me a really clear story about the world that you're trying to build and the product that you want to build and how the world would be different. And that's something, I think that's accessible to anybody, regardless of background or experience.