What We Look for in a Founding Team

Every investor claims to back great founders. The phrase has become so overused that it has nearly lost meaning. But the question of what makes a founding team genuinely strong — especially in deeptech, where the bar for technical credibility is high and the tolerance for self-deception is low — is one worth taking seriously. Here is what we actually look for.

The first quality is depth without brittleness. Deeptech founders often come from academic or research backgrounds, and the depth of their technical knowledge is genuine. What distinguishes the best from the rest is how they hold that knowledge. Brittle founders believe their approach is correct because they have spent years developing it and are emotionally attached to the result. Deep-but-flexible founders hold their technical positions strongly but remain genuinely open to evidence that they are wrong. They can explain the assumptions underlying their approach and articulate what would need to be true for a competing approach to be better. This intellectual honesty is rare and extremely valuable.

The second quality is communication range. Deeptech founders need to be able to talk to scientists, engineers, enterprise procurement teams, regulators, and investors — sometimes in the same week. The founders who struggle are those who are brilliant in one register but lose their audience in others. The best can modulate without losing accuracy: they simplify without dumbing down, and they use precision when the situation requires it. This is a learnable skill, but it needs to be present in seed form at the founding stage.

Third, we look at the team's theory of their own unfair advantage. What do they know, or have access to, or can do, that others cannot easily replicate? In software, this is often a distribution advantage or a network effect. In deeptech, it is usually a combination of proprietary data, unique technical insight, or domain expertise that took years to accumulate. The best founding teams are articulate about their specific advantage and have a roadmap for compounding it over time. Teams that answer this question vaguely — "we move faster" or "we're more focused" — are often building on a technical foundation that is more contested than they realise.

Fourth, we look at how the founding team resolves disagreements internally. This sounds like a soft question, but it is one of the best predictors of how a team will behave under stress. Teams that disagree openly, work through the disagreement on the merits, and land on a position they are all willing to execute tend to be resilient. Teams where one person always prevails, or where conflict goes underground, tend to fracture when the company faces its first major setback. We ask founders to describe a significant technical or strategic disagreement they've had with their co-founder and how they resolved it. The answer tells us a great deal.

Finally, we look at the relationship between the founding team and the specific problem they are solving. The best founders are not working on a problem because it seemed like a good market opportunity when they mapped the space. They are working on it because they encountered it directly, found the existing solutions inadequate, and decided they were the right people to fix it. This origin story matters because it predicts staying power. The deeptech category is full of hard moments — failed experiments, slow customer procurement, technical pivots, competitive pressure from better-funded incumbents. Founders who got here through a genuine relationship with the problem are more likely to stay the course than those who chose the space because the deck looked good.

None of these qualities is sufficient alone, and none is a guarantee of success. Deeptech is genuinely hard, and even well-matched founding teams face challenges that have nothing to do with their quality. But these are the signals we weight most heavily, and they have served us well as a filter.