What We Look for in Founders

After more than decade of backing companies across consumer (b2c) and retail (b2b), here's our work-in-progress answer to the question we get asked most.

Mike Martin / Insight / July 2026

Introduction

We get asked a version of the same question a lot: "What do you actually look for in a founder?"

It’s difficult to have a rigid set of rules or a checklist – just like hiring, there is subjectivity in understanding people and human behaviour.

However, we believe it’s important to have a set of guiding principles, as it helps us benchmark the ~3,000 Founders a year that we meet.

We’ve pulled together a work-in-progress version of those opinions. As always, we'd love to know if you think we’ve missed something critical.

What We Look for in Founders

1. Missionary, Not Mercenary

The founders who build category-defining companies aren't primarily motivated by money. That might sound counterintuitive -venture capital exists to generate financial returns, after all - but the evidence is consistent: the best outcomes come from founders who are driven by something bigger than the exit.

So what does that look like in practice?

It's a founder who can articulate why they are making it their life’s work to build this company.

Someone with a long-term orientation - one who thinks in years and decades, not funding rounds.

It's the kind of conviction in the mission that will attract great early employees, wins early customers, and sustains a team through the inevitable hard chapters, when a mercenary might have already moved on.

Paul Graham put it well: missionaries build products they'd want to exist in the world regardless. Mercenaries build products they think will sell.

2. Problem Obsession

Closely related - but distinct - from the missionary trait is how deeply a founder understands the specific problem they're solving. The ones who build enduring companies aren't solving problems they've read about in a market report. They're solving problems they've lived, or that they've watched others struggle with up close, for long enough to understand the nuance that outsiders miss.

We're looking for founders who have developed a genuinely differentiated, first-principles view of their problem space. Do they light up talking about the problem? Do they know things about their customer that no survey could reveal? Can they explain not just what is broken, but why it has stayed broken for so long?

3. Resilience & Grit

Company-building is hard. The journey from conception to meaningful scale is defined by rejection, setbacks, and an almost relentless requirement to hold things together when everything seems to be going wrong simultaneously. The odds are stacked against you from day one.

Founders who navigate that journey well share a specific type of resilience: not the capacity to absorb pain passively, but an active, almost stubborn refusal to accept "no" as a final answer. The best ones are comfortable being uncomfortable - they've chosen to spend their professional lives in a state of managed uncertainty, and they've found a way to thrive in it.

We look for founders who have run through walls and experienced real adversity (not necessarily in business).

4. Speed and Intensity

In early-stage company building, the rate of learning matters as much as anything else. The founders who pull ahead aren't always the ones who started with the best idea — they're the ones who learned the fastest, iterated quickest, and held themselves and their teams to standards that most people would find uncomfortable.

We look for founders with an ingrained bias for action: people who default to doing rather than deliberating, who ship and learn rather than planning to perfection. It means having the confidence to move before everything is certain, and the discipline to extract learning from every move you make.

The intensity piece is equally important. The best founders we've backed hold themselves and their teams to genuinely high expectations - not in a way that burns people out, but in a way that ensures everyone is moving the company forward with a winning mindset. They create an environment where everyone has clarity of expectations and how high the bar is, because everyone has bought into what they're building.

5. Competitiveness

The best founders we've backed share something that's harder to name but unmistakable in person: a deep, almost visceral desire to win - and an equally visceral reaction to losing.

This often comes with what people call a "chip on their shoulder": a point to prove, a slight to avenge, an underestimation to correct. Some of the most successful founders in our portfolio were people who had been told their idea wouldn't work, their market was too small, or they weren't the right person to go after it. That external scepticism, internalised as fuel rather than doubt, can be extraordinarily powerful.

We're looking for a genuine obsession with being the best at what they do: an intolerance for mediocre output, a relentless focus on beating the alternatives in their customer's life (whether that's a competitor, a spreadsheet, or doing nothing), and the hunger to keep raising the bar even when things are going well.

6. The Ability to Sell

Selling is a non-negotiable skill that founders need at every stage of company-building. You're selling your vision to investors, employees, customers, and potentially a eventual buyer. The best founders are doing all of this simultaneously, and doing it well, from the very beginning.

Storytelling is a big part of selling that’s often underrated. The best founders we've backed can take a complex problem space and make it immediately, viscerally understandable to someone who has never thought about it before. They have a gift for the right analogy, the right anecdote, the right moment of specificity that makes an abstract opportunity feel real and urgent.

The listening piece is equally important, and often missing. The founders who sell best are they the ones who pay enough attention to know exactly which version of the story to tell, and adjust in real time based on what they're hearing.

Why Consumer Is Its Own Category - and What We Look for Specifically

Everything above applies to every founder we back. But here's what we specifically look for in consumer founders:

Intuition for where consumer behaviour is going, not just where it is. We want to back founders who see inflection points before they're consensus. The best consumer founders are typically six months to two years ahead of a trend, in a way they can articulate clearly.

Product genius paired with genuine human empathy. There's a meaningful difference between a good product and one people love. Love shows up in the data: word-of-mouth referrals, retention curves, NPS scores. The best consumer founders pair product talent with deep human insight — because product genius without empathy produces technically impressive things that nobody uses.

Community as structure, not marketing. Consumer is a social category. People buy things, use apps, and subscribe to services in the context of their identities and communities. The best consumer founders build community into the product architecture from the start, as a structural element that drives down CAC, increases LTV, and creates the emotional moat that contributes to defensibility. The question we ask: "Tell us about your most passionate users. What do they have in common? How do they talk about you to their friends?"

The economics of love. In consumer, retention earned through genuine product love is fundamentally different from retention earned through friction or lock-in. If a founder's retention strategy relies on making it annoying to cancel, that's a warning sign. If it relies on the product being irreplaceable in someone's daily life, that's what we want to back.

So - Are You Who We're Looking For?

If you're building something in consumer or retail tech - and you think you’d be a good fit with us - we'd love to hear from you.

We invest at the earliest stages - pre-seed/seed, across consumer software, consumer services, retail tech, and B2B tools for the consumer & retail ecosystem. We bring sector expertise, a deep network across the global consumer and retail landscape, and a genuine interest in building something alongside you for the long term.

Get in touch at vc@true.global. And if you disagree with anything above, tell us where we're wrong!