The best founders have a secret — a genuine, non-obvious insight about why the market is wrong right now. That's what I'm looking for.
Thunder lizards look crazy at the seed stage. They're supposed to. If they looked obviously good, someone would have funded them already.
The mistake isn't backing companies that fail. The mistake is backing companies that fail for boring, predictable reasons you should have caught.
I look for market-insight fit before I look for product-market fit. The insight has to come first. You can't manufacture the insight later.
The hardest part of seed investing is staying honest about whether you're applying your actual thesis or defaulting to comfortable pattern-matching.
Being the first check means you're evaluating with almost no data. You're betting on the founder's ability to generate the data that doesn't exist yet.