We say we back technical founders. People hear «engineers only». That is not what we mean, and the misunderstanding costs us pitches we would like to read.

The test

A technical founder, to us, is someone who has done the job their product replaces. It is not a job title, and it is not a degree.

• A grid planner building planning software
• A controller building treasury tools
• An engineer who was paged at three in the morning, building the thing that would have let her sleep

Each of them knows something that cannot be learned from interviews: where the work actually goes wrong, who signs for the fix, and which part of the problem people have stopped complaining about because they assume it cannot be solved.

Why it matters at the first cheque

Before there is revenue, the only evidence is the founder's own knowledge of the problem. There are no customers to call and no accounts to read. That knowledge is the one thing we can check in fourteen days, so it is the thing we check.

In practice the third page of our memo is about this and nothing else. The partner writes down what the founder did before, for how long, and what they saw that others in the same job did not.

What we ask on the first call

• What did you do, day to day, before you started this?
• What did the existing tools make you do by hand?
• Who else in that job would tell us the same thing?

Then we call those people. If they describe the problem the way you do, most of the argument is made.

What it does not mean

It does not mean you must write the code yourself. Several founders we back hired their first engineer with our cheque. It does not mean a doctorate, and it does not mean ten years in a large company.

We are not looking for a title. We are looking for someone the problem has already happened to.

If that is you

Write to us, even if the product is a sketch. Tell us what you did before in one line. It is the line a partner reads first, and the one we remember.