A Philosophy Built from Pattern Recognition
At the earliest stage, good investors back people. My take is the best ones to back are those shaped by adversity. I learned this from studying philosophy, cognitive science, & history. All the greats had a "come-up" story and/or a passion that couldn't be quelled by their environment. Hummingbird Ventures has their emphasis on lived experience. Angela Duckworth's book on grit. My own lived experiences, losses, & accomplishments. It is a great predictor and has been throughout history (take a look back at Napoleon, Isaac Newton, and forward at Elon Musk).
Forged by Fire
At the earliest stages (pre-product, pre-revenue, sometimes pre-idea), the founder is 80% of the equation. Market size or PMF might validate an idea. It doesn't predict whether a company survives its near-death moments. Every startup faces multiple existential crises where pivots inevitably invalidate months of work. Intelligence doesn't determine the outcome and pedigree can't save you - tempered resilience can.
Real hardship. Not the sanitized "I worked hard to get here" trope you hear time and time again. Early scarcity that taught resourcefulness, failure that could have been terminal, competitive pressure that demanded success or failure. People who've lived through real adversity operate and see life differently. What psychologists call stress inoculation - exposure to difficulty that recalibrates your threat response. Things will fall apart, shit will hit the fan, the sky might even fall. Welcoming the challenge is first-nature because those who were forged in fire know through their experience that uncertainty is survivable, conventional paths will continually evolve, and that you can rebuild from wreckage.
One cogent point in it all is that founders worth backing aren't unfamiliar with failure - they are deeply intimate with it because it without failure there is no growth. They studied it because it was the only path through. They learned and adapted to be someone who uses it as a catalyst for their own growth. Eventually, inevitably, they married it. That intimacy with failure, with collapse, with ignoring consensus and the advice that what they are doing is "impossible" and "unreasonable."
The Unreasonable Competitive Fire
Exceptional founders are privileged with reality distortion. Unreasonably confident and optimistic about what they can accomplish. They imagine possibilities that that are farfetched, at best, and treat them as inevitable. Beneath this optimism runs fierce competitive fire. The best founders want to win, not vaguely or aspirationally, but dominantly and relentlessly. It is a crude mixture of conscientiousness and openness. At the heart of it, they do it for the love of the game.
Non-Linear Paths
Show me a perfectly linear resume and I'll show you someone optimized for legibility. The most interesting builders have gaps in their resumes that signal exactly what makes them valuable: intellectual honesty, willingness to abandon safe paths for something more compelling, courage to bet on unconventional instincts. Building something new requires independent thinking, contrarian to the point where if it has been thought of it probably isn't relevant. What is relevant is the ideas deemed as insignificant and trivial.
The best and most interesting people I have met have shared with me what their childhood was like - a beautiful level of trust and vulnerability. What did you have to overcome? When did you first learn the rules don't apply the way people say? What were you doing at 14, and why? These answers tell you if someone was forged or just credentialed.
How to Actually See This
None of this fits on a diligence checklist. Can't score "grit" on a rubric. But you can approach founder conversations differently. Start with their origin story instead of polished pitches. Look for non-linear journeys. Unconventional paths, choices that seem risky or poorly explained by careerism. Watch how they handle uncertainty in the conversation itself. Do they need everything mapped out or can they operate in ambiguity? When you probe a difficult question, do they retreat to scripts or think in real-time? Listen for clear-eyed intensity about winning the specific game they chose.
This psychological calibration for building from nothing under radical uncertainty doesn't come from privilege or pedigree. It comes from loving the human condition, integrated and transformed into relentless deep seated purpose within their psyche. That's what separates the ones worth backing - that is why I back founders with earned conviction.