Insights
What I Look For in Early-Stage Founders
People ask what I look for in an early-stage founder. The honest answer is that it's rarely the idea. Ideas change. Markets move. The thing I'm actually betting on is the person's ability to navigate that change without losing the plot.
Clear thinking about a real problem
The strongest founders can explain, in plain language, a problem that genuinely exists and genuinely hurts. Not a solution looking for a problem — a problem they understand so well that the solution feels almost obvious once they describe it. Clarity here is a proxy for how deeply they've actually engaged with the thing they're building.
Strong opinions, loosely held
I want a founder who can hold a firm view and still change their mind when the evidence changes. That combination is rare. Too much conviction and you get someone who drives off a cliff with total confidence. Too little and you get someone who can't make a decision at all. The founders worth backing update fast without being blown around by every new opinion.
A bias toward building
Clarity comes from shipping, not from another month of planning. The founders I find most compelling are the ones already building — putting something imperfect in front of real users and learning from what happens. Motion beats meetings. You can always improve direction later; you can't improve a thing that doesn't exist.
A business underneath the technology
This is the one people underrate. Plenty of founders can build impressive technology. Far fewer are building an actual business around it — thinking clearly about who pays, why, how they'll be reached, and what it costs to serve them. Technology is the easy half now. The business is the hard, durable part, and it's what I'm really looking for signs of.
The intangible
And then there's the thing that doesn't fit on a checklist: whether talking to the founder makes me more optimistic about the problem than I was before. That energy — grounded, not hype — is usually a sign that someone will find a way through the inevitable hard parts. If I can genuinely help them get there faster, that's the kind of founder I want to work with.
Entrepreneur, Co-Founder & COO of BoostMySites, associated with BoostMySites Global (Hong Kong). He writes about AI automation, operations, scaling and working with early-stage founders. More about Darshan →