From Start-Up to Grown-Up — Isabelle Freidheim: How to spot a future successful founder

As an investor, what do you look for in a founder such that you know they're gonna be successful? You want to partner with them on this journey.

So I think you look for qualities in founders one step at a time, meaning what can they do for the company that you invest in for the next 3 years, not for the next 10 years, because that is very, very, very rare. Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, that's very rare. Most companies will have a growth founder or someone who will be best equipped to start a company or someone who will be best equipped to run a publicly traded company. And there are many failures along the way when the interest isn't there. And sometimes founders have the interest, but they can't pull it off for whatever reason and it gets in the way and, or they would really prefer to start another company, but they're stuck in a publicly traded company as CEO and it doesn't match. And of course anyone can grow into a role, but sometimes it's a matter of not that it can't grow, but that they're not interested because their passion was really founding a company. The founder of the company is a good public or CEO of a publicly traded company. But again, some have grown and some have found their comfort zone there, but for the most part, it's pretty rare. So, and if it works out, great. But I personally look when I make that investment 4 or 3 years ahead.