When evaluating first-time founders, certain qualities often distinguish those who are most likely to excel.
Rajiv Srivatsa, a partner at Antler India, mostly does work focusing on:
Co-founder matching
Deep business model validation
Initial capital
Expansion support, and
Follow-on funding
“We run a set of interventions and activities designed to forge meaningful connections and collaborations between. Ultimately, the goal is to help find the ideal co-founder, a long-term and enduring partnership. We stress-test the co-founder’s relationship, emphasizing the common value match. For most tech startups, we recommend an equal partnership between the business co-founder and the tech co-founder,” says Srivatsa.
Srivata observed that while each founder’s approach may differ, there are specific traits that consistently predict success in the arduous task of venture building.
In this article, we distill the five key qualities that stood out for him in first-time founders—traits that inspire confidence among venture funders like himself, pushing them to invest in a startup.
1.) Execution and strategy
This is their ability to iterate fast – move between ideas, drop things, and find something new quickly.
We also seek people who have ideas that match their skill sets. For example, we don’t want to invest in an AI company where none of the founders have solid tech expertise. In the early or ‘zero to one’ and ‘one to 10’ stages, founders have to be able to do things on their own.
2.) Grit and tenacity
According to Srivatsa, successful founders have demonstrated grit and tenacity either in their personal life or professional life.
Grit is a term that was made famous by the book GRIT by American psychologist, Angela Duckworth, where she shows parents, educators, students, and business people, both seasoned and new, that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but a focused persistence called grit.
The question the book GRIT is premised on is why do some people succeed and others fail? Based on her research, Angela explains why talent is hardly a guarantor of success. She has found that grit – a combination of passion and perseverance for a singularly important goal – is the hallmark of high achievers in every domain.
Tenacity is a term closely related to grit and it involves the quality of a person to be very determined. This can be understood even clearer from one dictionary definition that defines it as the quality or fact of being able to grip something firmly.
3.) Customer obsession
As Srivatsa says, at Antler, they spend the longest time gauging how obsessed a founder is with their customer and problem statement.
“We want to know if it’s just a flash in the pan or if it’s something they have been debating over many years. Does the founder really feel the pain of the customer?
We want people who are not just armchair experts but have worked with customers and gotten their hands dirty. Someone who has spent their professional life making presentations and in conference rooms may not cut it.”
Indeed, customer obsession is one of the famous ideas in the world of business having been championed by Amazon, one of the most important companies in the world. Nowadays many companies deploy this idea as a strategy including many of Africa’s leading companies like Safaricom, MTN, and the banks.
As the idea is used at Salesforce, customer obsession is what happens when a company connects everything they do with customer needs. Learn how customer obsession works.
4.) Communication
This is often put out as a major weakness for many people who are technical, that they are just not that great at communicating their ideas and plans with other people. But this is a major drawback, as Srivatsa, himself a former founder, indicates.
At Antler, another thing they look for is a high level of clarity in thinking and how the potential founders communicate.
“At the end of the day, venture capital is a continuous fundraising game — you have to always keep finding good talent, as well as keep telling new investors and the media your story,” says Srivatsa.
“We try to gauge if the person is getting mixed up, or if they’re clear about what they’re doing.
5.) Ambition and scale
Ambition and desire for expansion are perhaps the main differentiator between a founder and an ordinary business person. The main factor behind the entrepreneurial giants of our current age is their embrace of expansion and risk appetite.
This is what has fuelled the rise of Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Apple.
The venture capital industry does not work if you want small outcomes. Even if you don’t want to be a unicorn, a startup that is valued at $1 billion, you still need to think in terms of hundreds of millions of dollars of valuation and foresee hundreds of millions of people using your product.
In conclusion, the ability to execute, grit, customer obsession, communication, and ambition are some of the most important factors that determine how well first-time founders are going to do in their venture-building experience.
While the journey is never easy, these qualities can make the difference between merely having a great idea and turning that idea into a successful, sustainable business.
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