They'll be the operators who understand a business well enough to aim the technology at where value is trapped, and who can coordinate across teams whose work they don't fully own to release it. Technical depth is becoming abundant. Judgment about where to point it is not.
I look for the same trait in founders: not the deepest engineer in the room, but the one who reads the market, sequences the build, and turns capability into adoption. I sharpened that lens during a venture fellowship, and I still use it every week.
A healthtech startup screened well below the top of the stack. Traction and growth were unremarkable against the cohort. On a purely quantitative read, it was an easy pass.
Their data-collection methodology was quietly unique: an asset that compounds over time but doesn't show up in early traction numbers.
Read what a company is building toward, not just where its numbers sit today. The story is often in the layer standard metrics don't look at.
- Diligence — financial modeling, market sizing and competitive analysis
- Sourcing — founder and expert relationships feeding a live pipeline
- Representation — 10+ industry events, qualifying opportunities
Vitamin, painkiller or infrastructure? How precisely does the solution meet a real, urgent need?
Adaptability under pressure, clarity in uncertainty, and how someone responds to being challenged: the predictors a résumé can't show.
Assume the product already exists. Who would miss it if it vanished, and what would that absence cost them?
Not a binary invest-or-pass, but a map of current fit, future collaboration and network value that outlasts one decision.
Advising an early-stage startup on positioning and go-to-market, deciding which new markets are worth entering, and vetting AI vendors and tools before my team commits to them. Same questions, different rooms.
Curated rooms, not crowded ones. That's where signal lives.