Most first meetings are decided in the first ten minutes — not because we rush to judgment, but because the clearest founders get to the point quickly. They tell us who the customer is, what the customer does today, and why that is painful enough to pay to fix.
We spend the rest of the call trying to understand what the team knows that others do not. Sometimes that is years inside an industry. Sometimes it is a hundred customer conversations in three months. Either works; what matters is that the insight is earned.
Finally, we pay attention to how bad news is handled. Every company has a weak spot. The founders we back name it before we find it, and they arrive with a plan.