The most common question founders ask after receiving a pass from a venture fund is: "What would have changed your decision?" It is a sincere question, and the honest answer is rarely comfortable. In most cases, the decision was not primarily about the business — the market was large enough, the product was interesting, the traction was directionally encouraging. The decision was about the founders. And the part that is difficult to articulate, even for investors who have spent years trying to make it explicit, is precisely what about the founders made the difference.
At Leveiir, we have invested in 28 companies across 16 countries and passed on many hundreds more. We have been wrong in both directions — passed on companies that went on to build something extraordinary, backed founders who turned out not to be the right people to execute their original vision. Every mistake has sharpened our thinking. What follows is our best current attempt to articulate what we actually look for when we evaluate founders — not as a checklist, but as a framework for the kind of holistic judgment that seed-stage investing ultimately requires.
Why Founder Evaluation Is the Central Act of Seed Investing
At the seed stage, nearly everything is undetermined. The product is usually a version zero or a sophisticated prototype. The market hypothesis is unvalidated at scale. The competitive landscape may shift dramatically before the company reaches meaningful revenue. The organizational structure that will eventually be needed is nowhere close to existing. In the face of all this uncertainty, the investor is making a fundamentally human judgment: do these people have what it takes to navigate what they cannot yet see?
This is why every serious seed investor will tell you that they invest in people first. But that principle is nearly meaningless without a clear account of what "investing in people" actually means — what specific qualities you are looking for, how you identify them in a 60-minute meeting, and how you distinguish genuine signals from sophisticated performance. We have organized our thinking into five dimensions.
Dimension 1: Domain Conviction
The first and most foundational dimension is what we call domain conviction — a quality that is meaningfully different from enthusiasm, expertise, or passion, though it contains elements of all three. Domain conviction is the state in which a founder has spent enough time inside a specific problem that they have developed views that are not easily shaken by superficial objections, validated by authoritative sources, or redirected by investor interest in adjacent opportunities. It is the combination of deep knowledge and settled certainty about why this particular problem, in this particular market, approached in this particular way, is worth the next decade of one's life.
The way we test for domain conviction in a pitch meeting is not by asking the founder to explain their market. It is by asking them to explain what everyone else is getting wrong about their market. Founders with genuine domain conviction will have a clear, specific, and often contrarian answer to this question — because having spent years inside a problem, they have inevitably identified the misconceptions and oversimplifications that prevent outsiders from seeing what they see. Founders who are enthusiastic but not deeply convicted will give a version of the standard market narrative. The difference is detectable within the first two minutes.
Domain conviction also manifests in how founders talk about failure modes and risks. A founder with genuine conviction about their domain has usually already thought through the most likely ways they could be wrong — because their deep familiarity with the problem space has exposed them to the evidence that pushes back against their thesis. When we ask "what's the strongest argument against what you're building?", the most compelling founders give answers that are specific, thoughtful, and that demonstrate they have grappled with the counterarguments seriously. The weak answer is "honestly, I don't see many risks at this stage."
Dimension 2: Intellectual Honesty
Intellectual honesty is one of the rarest and most valuable qualities in a founder — and also one of the most frequently simulated. A founder who is genuinely intellectually honest combines two capacities that are in tension with each other: the ability to hold a strong thesis with conviction, and the ability to update that thesis quickly and without ego when the evidence demands it. Most people can do one of these things. Very few can do both simultaneously.
The founders who build truly exceptional companies are not those who are always right — it is impossible to be always right when you are operating at the frontier of a new market, with incomplete information, under constant time pressure. The founders who build exceptional companies are those who are right more often than the base rate would predict, and who are wrong for shorter periods of time when they are wrong. This is only possible if they are willing to hear evidence that contradicts their beliefs, to admit when something is not working, and to change course without treating it as a personal defeat.
One of the most reliable tests of intellectual honesty in a pitch meeting is to push back on a claim the founder has made — not aggressively, but substantively. A founder who is intellectually honest will engage with the pushback seriously: they will either present counter-evidence that addresses the concern, or they will acknowledge that the concern is valid and explain what it would take to resolve it. A founder who lacks intellectual honesty will defend their position regardless of the quality of the argument — using rhetorical techniques, pivoting to adjacent claims, or becoming defensive. The distinction is usually apparent within one or two cycles of genuine challenge.
Intellectual honesty also shows up in how founders discuss their early customer conversations. The founders who have genuinely internalized feedback from the market tell stories that contain failure, confusion, and course correction — because that is what real market feedback looks like. Founders who present an unrealistically smooth validation narrative are either filtering the feedback through a lens of wishful thinking, or they have not yet had enough real customer conversations to have accumulated enough disconfirming evidence. Neither is a good sign.
Dimension 3: Global Ambition
Global ambition is a dimension that is specific to Leveiir's investment thesis, and it deserves careful explanation because it is frequently misunderstood. We do not simply want founders who want to "go global" in the abstract — every founder wants their company to be big, and claiming global ambition is trivially easy. What we are looking for is something more specific: founders who have thought concretely and carefully about what building a global company actually entails, and who have made product, architectural, and operational decisions that reflect that thinking.
The questions we use to probe global ambition are deliberately practical. How have you structured your entity to enable capital from non-US investors? How have you designed your data architecture to comply with EU data residency requirements? Which markets are you entering in what order, and what is the specific rationale for that sequencing rather than any other? Who is your legal counsel in each jurisdiction where you plan to operate, and what regulatory frameworks apply to your business in those markets?
These questions are deliberately uncomfortable for founders who have not thought carefully about global operations — and that is the point. The founders who can answer them fluently and specifically are not necessarily those who have already solved all of these problems; they are those who have identified them as real problems worth solving, and who have begun the work of solving them. That orientation — the willingness to do the hard, unglamorous operational work that global scale requires — is what separates founders who mean it from founders who aspire to it.
Dimension 4: Operational Resilience
Operational resilience is, bluntly, the ability to keep going when things are hard — and things will be hard. The history of every extraordinary startup contains multiple episodes that, in the moment, looked potentially fatal: a key engineer who quit on the day of a critical demo, a major customer who cancelled a contract that represented 60% of revenue, a fundraising round that fell apart in the final hour, a product launch that revealed a fundamental assumption to be wrong. The founders who build enduring companies are those who can absorb these shocks — not without being affected by them, but without being incapacitated by them.
We try to understand a founder's operational resilience by asking them to walk us through the hardest thing that has happened in building the company so far. The answer to this question reveals an enormous amount. It reveals what the founder considers "hard" — which tells you about their tolerance for adversity relative to what they have already experienced. It reveals how they responded to adversity — whether they focused on root causes or blamed external factors, whether they made structural changes or relied on force of will. And it reveals how they narrate difficulty in retrospect — whether they have integrated the experience into a stronger view of what they are building, or whether they are still carrying it as unresolved anxiety.
Operational resilience is not toughness in the sense of stoicism or the suppression of emotion. The founders we most admire are often emotionally expressive about the difficulty of what they are doing — they do not pretend that hard things are easy. What distinguishes them is that their emotional honesty about difficulty coexists with an unbroken narrative about why the work is worth it. The conviction and the candor reinforce each other, rather than being in tension.
Dimension 5: Team Architecture
The fifth dimension is about the founding team as a system rather than as a collection of individuals. Individual founder quality is necessary but not sufficient — the pattern of complementary skills, the quality of trust between co-founders, and the culture that the founders are already creating in their earliest hiring decisions are often more predictive of long-term success than the quality of any single individual.
We look at team architecture along three axes. First, functional completeness: does the founding team collectively cover the core domains required to build and sell the product without significant gaps that must be immediately filled by early hires? A pure technical founding team building an enterprise software company has a functional gap in go-to-market that will need to be addressed quickly; a founding team with both technical depth and enterprise sales experience has a head start on the problem. Neither configuration is universally better — it depends on the product and market — but we want to understand how the founders are thinking about the gaps and the plan to address them.
Second, trust quality: how long have the co-founders known each other, in what contexts, and how have they handled disagreement? Co-founder relationships are the most important relationship in a startup — they are the foundation on which everything else is built, and when they break down (which happens with meaningful frequency), the consequences are severe. We want to understand the origin story of the founding team, how the co-founders have resolved disagreements, and whether there are clear decision-making processes for the areas where their authority overlaps.
Third, cultural signal: the first ten hires almost completely determine the culture of a company for the next several years. We pay close attention to how founders talk about their early hires — not just the credentials they sought, but the values and working styles they prioritized, the candidates they passed on and why, and the culture they are trying to build. Founders who have thought carefully about culture early are building something intentional; founders who have simply hired the best available resume are building something that will require significant cultural remediation later.
How These Dimensions Interact in Practice
In practice, our evaluation of a founding team across these five dimensions happens simultaneously rather than sequentially. A single pitch meeting generates data across all five dimensions — the way a founder answers a technical question about their market reveals something about domain conviction and intellectual honesty simultaneously; the way they describe their co-founder relationship reveals something about team architecture and operational resilience; the way they respond to questions about international expansion reveals their global ambition and operational thinking simultaneously.
The hardest part of founder evaluation is calibrating these dimensions against each other. A founding team with extraordinary domain conviction and team architecture but limited global ambition may be exactly right for a company targeting a large but geographically concentrated market. A solo founder with exceptional intellectual honesty and operational resilience but an incomplete functional profile may be able to attract the co-founder or early hire who fills the gap, if the opportunity is compelling enough. The framework is a lens for generating insight, not a scoring rubric for generating decisions.
We also try to be honest with ourselves about the limits of what a short pitch meeting can reveal. We use reference conversations, portfolio introductions, and in some cases working sessions with the founding team as additional data sources. The evaluation process is not a single meeting — it is an accumulation of evidence across multiple interactions, each of which reveals a different facet of the team we are trying to understand.
What We Are Not Looking For
It is worth being explicit about some things we do not weight heavily in our founder evaluation, because they are disproportionately represented in the conventional wisdom about startup success.
We do not weight educational pedigree heavily. Some of the most extraordinary founders we have backed did not attend elite universities; some of the most disappointing investments involved founding teams whose credentials were impeccable. Educational pedigree is a weak proxy for the qualities we actually care about — and it is a proxy that systematically disadvantages the international founders who are building some of the most interesting companies in our portfolio.
We do not weight prior startup success as heavily as many funds do. Successful founders who start again sometimes bring exactly the right lessons from their first company to their second. Just as often, they bring assumptions from a particular market environment that do not transfer, or they replicate a playbook that worked once in a very different context. We care more about a founder's capacity to learn than their track record of having already learned.
We do not weight charisma heavily. The ability to tell a compelling story is useful — fundraising, recruiting, and sales all require it — but it is a learnable skill, and it is one that frequently co-exists with the kinds of intellectual dishonesty and overconfidence that are among the most dangerous qualities in a founder. Our evaluation process is designed to see through the performance to the substance underneath.
If you are a founder preparing to meet with Leveiir, the best preparation is not to practice your pitch. It is to know your market deeply, to have genuine opinions about what everyone else is getting wrong, to have thought carefully about the specific ways you might fail, and to be ready to have an honest and substantive conversation about all of it. That is the kind of meeting that leads to a partnership — and it is the only kind of meeting we find genuinely interesting.