Inside My Decision Curve: The First 15 Minutes with a Founder

I just finished a series going through the key slides of a pitch deck, but that’s just the start of raising venture capital. I wanted to make the process a little less opaque so I’m starting a new series called the Decision Curve. How does a seed stage investor move from curiosity to conviction to writing a check?

For what tends to usually be a several week process, it is amazing how much you can learn about your interest to invest from the first ten minutes of your first meeting with a founder.

One of the quickest tells? Confidence versus arrogance. And that’s actually pretty easy to see right away.

Confidence vs. Arrogance

This can be a fine line. Founders need confidence, lots of it. Often way more than any normal person would have. You’re going to get told no a hundred times. You’ll be told your idea is dumb. You’re going to get beat down. You’ve got to believe in yourself and your idea more than is reasonable. If out of the gate you lack confidence in your idea or ability it will show.

But arrogance can kill a startup. When you’re arrogant, you stop listening. You might sit there while someone’s talking, but it’s going in one ear and out the other. You immediately dismiss ideas, thoughts or people. You start name dropping people that you think will impress or how you are the only one that has ever thought of this idea. You’re not collecting data points to make more informed decisions. You’ve already decided you know it all.

You can pick up when someone stops listening really fast. If I give feedback and a founder quickly dismisses it without pause or a thoughtful rebuttal, that’s arrogance. If they lean in, ask follow-up questions, maybe challenge me but actually want to hear my perspective — that to me is confidence. That’s a founder I want to work with. I’m not saying that you should to take all of the advice and feedback from investors and advisors (this would actually be impossible to do!). But every great founder loves to collect data points from valuable sources but is still confident enough to make their own, informed decision.

One way to look at this is that confidence isn’t rooted in bravado — it’s often rooted in conviction.

Conviction Isn’t Always Obvious

It sounds a little crazy, but not every founder has 100% conviction in their idea. You’d think that would be automatic, but it’s not. There are levels of conviction, and you can see it in small ways.

A big one: Talking about selling the company quickly. Why? If you’re already thinking about exits before you’ve even built something meaningful, that tells me you’re not all that passionate about your idea. You’re in it for a flip, not to build.

Another signal: The founder isn’t full time. If you hear, “Once we raise funding, then I’ll go full time,” it is a signal. I get that sometimes life requires more stability but at the seed stage, for an investor it makes it a harder hill to climb to get excited about investing.

And then there’s false conviction. Overselling. Talking nonstop so there’s no space for a question. Acting like everything’s perfect (trust me it isn’t). Every startup has red flags. Every startup has blemishes. Pretending yours doesn’t exist is unrealistic.

Coachability

What does coachability look like? To me, it’s about being willing to collect data points. The best founders don’t just do what investors or advisors say — but they do listen. They collect the inputs, they process them, and then they make their own call.

And you can see coachability come out in those early meetings. It’s in the kinds of questions a founder asks. It’s in how curious they are. It’s when you give feedback and instead of brushing it off, they dig in or push back in a thoughtful way.

When someone isn’t coachable, that shows up, too. Talking over a co-founder. Plowing straight through a pitch without stopping to check in. Immediately dismissing a comment. If the founder isn’t coachable, usually the culture at the company isn’t one that fosters growth, and that’s a path to failure.

Early Signals

Those first ten to fifteen minutes are often packed with signals in addition to the above. Most investors will tell you that within fifteen minutes of meeting a founder they have already decided if it is someone they want to invest in.

Positives: you’re prepared, on time, know your numbers, you’ve customized the pitch, you share your founding story and your passion for how you are changing the world.

Negatives: being late (if someone’s not there five minutes into a Zoom meeting, I usually just close it), name-dropping, overselling, claiming you’re the only one in the world doing something, dismissing feedback.

The Trifecta

Founders often think it’s all about the deck or the numbers. Those matter, but so do all these other things.

Conviction. Confidence. Coachability.

If you’ve got those, people lean in. If you don’t, no slide or future diligence is going to save you.