There's a pattern we've observed across our most successful investments: the founders who build lasting companies are the ones who stay deeply connected to their product and customers.
The Founder Advantage
Founder-led teams move faster, make bolder decisions, and maintain the kind of product intuition that hired operators rarely match. They carry the original vision forward even as the company scales.
This doesn't mean founders should do everything themselves. Delegation is critical. But the best founders delegate execution while retaining strategic ownership of the product direction.
The best founders we've backed share one trait: they can describe their customer's daily frustrations with more specificity than any analyst report.
What We Look For
- Domain obsession — they've lived the problem, not just studied it
- Speed of learning — how quickly they incorporate feedback
- Technical fluency — they don't need to code, but they need to understand the architecture
- Hiring taste — their first 10 hires tell you everything
The Delegation Spectrum
We've seen founders err in both directions — holding on too tightly or letting go too early. The inflection point usually comes around 30-50 employees. At that scale:
- Product vision stays with the founder
- Engineering execution moves to a trusted CTO/VP
- Go-to-market gets a dedicated leader
- Operations get systematized