How VCs Judge Founders With No Track Record

0:00Paige Craig: A good deal, but there are times when it's a really bad deal. And so common things that tell me it's a great deal is when I realize you are an obsessive. You have found the thing that just consumes you. And I can tell from our conversations that since you had this idea hit you, you took some action, right? You took some positive action and then really dug in quickly and realized that this was your calling. and every waking minute since then has been just an obsessive focus on making this happen. I don't care about revenue, but I do care about, and this is a very important one, how much time you're spending with customers.

0:36Paige Craig: Because truly great founders go out there and spend time, understand the problem. So you think. Paige Craig runs Outlander VC, where he writes first checks of one to three million at the idea stage. When there's no product, customers, or revenue, what makes a startup worth backing? We talk about how he judges founders, how to validate customer demand before you build, and what he expects after he invests. I'm Walter Thompson. This is Fund, Build, Scale. Are you building something that's hard to explain? It can be a sign you're working on something interesting, but it also raises the risk that you're missing out on fundraising, sales, hiring, and media opportunities.

1:16I help early stage founders sharpen the narrative. What matters, why now, who needs to care, and why they're the right team to make it happen. If you're preparing for a raise, a product launch, an important customer meeting, a panel discussion, or even a hiring push, I can help you pressure test your story before the stakes get higher. Visit the Fund Build Scale website to learn more or email fundbuildscale at gmail.com. Paige, thanks a lot for joining me today. I really appreciate your time. Thanks for having me. So for listeners who aren't familiar, what is Outlander VC and what do you focus on at the earliest stage?

1:52Paige Craig: We are a first check investor. So we aim to be the very first check into a founder who is as early as possible. We prefer pre-product, pre-everything. We just really want one, two, maybe three brilliant founders who are ready to build a massive business. So we come in with one to three million dollars at the idea stage. and then we'll back you up for the next 10, 15 years and work side by side with you through all the hard stuff. Sounds simple, but I'm guessing there's a lot more involved with a kind of a, you know, a multi-year relationship like that. Let's break it down. What does idea stage investing actually mean in practice?

2:29Like how early are you getting involved?

2:32Paige Craig: Tress, we truly mean idea stage. So when we did scale, I was the first checking the scale pre-YC. It was, we're going to go work on the AI and there's some interesting problems, but we don't know exactly what the thing is. I funded, you know, a company called Havoc, which is now one of the biggest maritime autonomy platforms. It was a couple veterans saying, hey, we think we need massive swarms of autonomous ships, but we've built nothing. We just have a whiteboard. And that is how early we like to invest. At that point, it seems like it's probably a cliche. You're kind of betting on the team and their ability to execute.

3:07It's not so much as the idea itself.

3:10Paige Craig: It is mostly the team. It is picking what I think of as an A-plus captain who can navigate that ship in some direction. So I do care about the general direction. I just don't care you tacking 95 degrees, 80 degrees. It's more about who are you, who's your co-founders, and we really dig into 38 points about you. And so we look at who you are as founders. And we do care about the direction you're going, but not the details yet. I hear from a lot of investors that you can usually tell in the first minute, 90 seconds, whether this is going to be a deal or not, or whether this is someone they're going to talk to maybe in a couple of years, or whether it's just a hard no.

3:51But usually, it seems like you can suss it out pretty early on. How do you read someone as a plus leader in that first 90 seconds, or looking at their deck? What are some of the, not traits, but actually behavioral signals?

4:07Paige Craig: So I definitely can't do it in 90 seconds. I'll tell you my process is, and then we often look for the unknown founders. We are looking for uncommon, unknown, quite often first-time founders who don't come from a traditional pattern or signal. And that's why we have founders all across America, a couple of dozen different cities. We have founders of all backgrounds. And, you know, there's no diversity here. There's no diversity like, hey, I need to fund veterans. or black founders or female founders, but we truly look at who you are and what you do and how you think. And so I'd say it probably takes me a couple hours to really know if this is going to be a good deal.

4:48Paige Craig: But there are times when it's a really bad deal. And so common things to tell me it's a great deal is when I realize you are an obsessive. You have found the thing that just consumes you. And I can tell from our conversations that since you had this idea hit you, You took some action, right? You took some positive action and then really dug in quickly and realized this was your calling. And every waking minute since then has been just an obsessive focus on making this happen. I don't care about revenue, but I do care about, and this is a very important one, how much time you're spending with customers.

5:24Paige Craig: Because truly great founders go out there and spend time understanding problems. So you think, oh, wow, there needs to be a marketplace for trees. Okay, well, you should probably go out there and talk to people who grow trees, sell trees, run marketplaces of trees. You should just be insanely deep in that sector. Other things, you know, the sort of locus of control, like how you look at the world is a big one for me. If you're someone who thinks I can take on anything, I don't care, tsunami hits the office, we're on a float and we're swimming out and we're going to start working the next day. It's you have to be someone who believes that you can overcome anything and just talk in the world.

6:07Paige Craig: So there's a lot we look for. Common red flags for us are people who think, you know, I can make a lot of money doing this. And you get that MBA type approach of this is a really good idea. And you go through it, you realize there's no passion. There's no connection to problem. One thing we talk about a lot is founder product fit, not just product market fit, but we think about founder product fit a lot. Why is this the thing that you need to do? And there are many great motivations, but I can spend hours talking about what we look for, what we don't look for. How far along in their customer discovery process should they be before they talk to you?

6:43Paige Craig: We will talk to a founder when they're at the stage of thinking about leaving the thing they're at today to start a startup. Now, it might be maybe a few weeks after that, maybe a month or two after that before we invest in you. But we do invest in people who are saying, hey, I have a thing I want to do. I'm going all in. We do require that you have left the other baggage behind and you have jumped headfirst. You've burned the boats at the beach. You must be all in on your thing. But we will talk to you before you've done that. So if you're at a startup, if you're in college, if you're in high school, we fund all those types of people.

7:19Paige Craig: If you're thinking, man, I really have a thing I think I want to go do, but I have some loose sentence to tie up, we will talk to people sometimes two, three, six months before they're truly ready to jump. But we aren't investing in you until you've made the jump yourself and said, I'm in that foxhole. I'm going to stay here and build it. But that's what we need to see. How long ago did you actually found Outlander VC? So I started after I saw my business in 2009 was when I first started investing. I was an angel for four years and I first created the venture firm in 20 at the end of 2014. Okay.

7:56Paige Craig: So, so looking back, I did about 75 deals as an angel before I did a real venture firm. Let's, let's switch a little bit and talk about real problem versus interesting idea. Cause I think that's something a lot of first time founders get stuck on that fence and they can't, they can't tear themselves away. It's hard. So what's the clearest signal you see that a founder is solving a really urgent problem and not just something interesting. So looking back over the, you know, some of the bigger companies in your portfolio, like Gusto, like that seems like place in time. That seems like a pretty good, I've been onboarded and a ton of small startups and it was always terrible.

8:28And then they started using Gusto and it wasn't a thing anymore. So that's an easy one. Um, but like tell me about some other ones where you're kind of like, they, they describe a problem and you're like, that's an easy one versus someone who describes something. And you're like, that's, that's an idea for a service or a feature, but not necessarily of business?

8:45Paige Craig: Yeah, it's hard. I'd say most of the time, given the nature of how we invest so early, there is no clear signal that this thing the founder's building is going to be great. Often case, it's a function of me betting how big this market will be, how deep this problem will be. And then me looking at the founder and finding someone who has an uncapped ambition and obsession, One of the biggest caps on our returns are investing in people whose sense of drive, their sense of purpose, their sense of ambition is not as high as we need. So I look for people who have sort of this unbounded ability and need to go build matched with a market that I think, and this is my estimation, not theirs, that I estimate is going to be massive.

9:35Paige Craig: For example, when I invested in scale, it wasn't clear in 2016 that AI or tagging AI data or LL, none of that was clear. It was just very clear to me that AI was going to be big. And if AI were big, what these, you know, what Lucy and Alex were building at the time would be huge. And Alex, as everyone has found, has unbounded, dry ambition and ability to go build. To give you another example, one that was very clear to me was a company called Honk. We recently sold them for a bit over$109 cash, which is not great for us as a fund. We're not returning our fund on that. But the founder smartly held on to a huge part of the business and has done incredibly well.

10:18Paige Craig: It's going to change his family for generations. He came to me with the idea to essentially do Uber for towing, Uber for roadside assistance. And I remember in our early discussions, this guy just hacked the system. I can't go into some, but he showed me very quickly with small numbers that there were so many people disappointed by the tow truck experience, right? Sure. And me being a former Marine with crappy cars, I had dealt with tow trucks and cars running out of juice. So, yeah, you sit there, right? You're calling, calling, hoping hours in the road. And he's like, man, why can't you just have an app like an Uber and you have a problem with your car?

10:53Paige Craig: You need gas. You need a battery charge. and within a year, I mean, I funded him his first couple months of business, but he'd show me in a very small microcosm of Southern California, how deep the demand was and I could really connect with it. And so I was like, yeah, if this guy can go out there and really own, own the system and be the hub for all roadside assistance, that could be a massive business. So that seems like a good example of the person and the problem, right? Because if they didn't have that ineffable, you know, special sauce, let's just call it, then the TAM would have been, you know, wouldn't have been as, I mean, yes, it's a great TAM, but if they couldn't have gone after it effectively and you couldn't have seen that, then it wouldn't have been a good bet.

11:36Paige Craig: Yeah, it could have been a very small business deal. And so, you know, Corey's drive, and he went through hell and back to make that business work. But most often companies look more like Gusto when there was no obvious, there was no obvious traction. We did the first round and the second round in gusto. And for me, it was just Josh and his co-founders, but really Josh Reeves is an incredible leader, an incredible builder of culture. But it wasn't, it wasn't any evidence that somehow they had made something that was special. It was more of, just like you and me, we've all dealt with crappy onboarding, mediocre systems.

12:13Paige Craig: And it was like, yeah, why can't the world have a better thing? And so I was like, yeah, that's a big market. And Josh is this really incredible leader. And those two forces came together. I funded this company, I said before, Havoc. And Paul came to me with this vision to build autonomous boats. But the problem with autonomous boats is you need millions of dollars to build your first boat. And there's no proof that the world wants autonomous boats two years ago. And now he's, you know, a unicorn company building, you know, fully autonomous boats and now aircraft and ground systems for the whole world.

12:46Paige Craig: But I'd say mostly at pre-seed, there is no evidence that the world needs what you're building. And so the bet I'm making on that first check, it is completely a bet or more appropriately an assessment of that founder and a bet that that market is big enough and that the time is right for that founder to go build something monumental. Okay. If I'm a founder listening to this and I don't have a product yet in the marketplace, what's one test I could run this week? Validate this problem, prove that it really exists. Is it just kind of - I mean, so go and talk to the people that you think would use it.

13:24Paige Craig: And there's all sorts of, you know, people that could use it. But I think that is the number one deficiency. Even with really bright founders, we often have to say, how many people have you talked to? Right? Like it's free go whatever you're doing even if it's military or it's government just go cold call those people go cold email go drive down to dc right go to bars around dc and meet military people like every single thing you're going to build in life as a founder as customers ideally and if you can't find them and even have conversations with them good luck building a product for them and so it is a you know i think uh there's this common notion that um you want look at these metrics around revenue at the stage that we invest it's a sounder's time and depth with customers that is most important to us if there were any metric at all in this how much time how many customers and it's different if they're doing enterprise versus consumer versus government what is if you if you go out there and you don't find a a small doesn't be big if you can't find a small pool of people, customers that really need something in the sector that you try to build for, then you better keep looking.

14:38Paige Craig: It doesn't mean give up, but you need to keep looking because if you can't find a beachhead with a small group of passionate users, you are not going to have a chance. I wanted to talk also about the concept of intelligence as learning speed. I hadn't really It's heard a lot of people can't specify this as an actual, you know, trader concept or actual really behavior. So when there's almost no data, what does that look like in practice? So that's, we think of this as learning velocity. And what we're imagining is you have this native slash learned ability to go into any situation and you can just pick up anything.

15:19Paige Craig: And so the way we understand that is we'll go through your short history as a founder and even past experiences. And what we're trying to find are times in your life when you went into situations where you were thrown into things that you didn't really understand what was going on. So whether you're a founder and you've done this as past startups or you work for someone and they threw you in a new situation, we'll often ask you like, tell us about a situation where you are given a role, a mission, a job and you realized, man, I don't know half the stuff I need to know to win. And it's a really important quality for us is to find people who are, one, not just okay, that love, like you look at the best founders, they love going into the unknown.

16:05Paige Craig: They love going into chaos and then making it work and learning. And so a founder's entire life is always surfing the edge and always going to situations. You know, like someday you're going to go do an IPO and at the end of the day, how many 28, 35-year-olds, 40-year-olds actually know what an IPO is? Well, you find out these founders quickly learn what you have to do to go public. And way before that, they learn how do you hire head of sales? How do you develop customer sports? There is no playbook, right? There is no recipe for all the college classes and people to give you advice. The truth is there is no cookie cutter approach to building a successful startup.

16:44Paige Craig: And so you need to have founders that love the unknown, that love chaos and create order within it and learn quickly because no one's given you years to be a master. You got to be able to pick stuff up and realize, hey, I need to be great at this. I need to get really good at this thing, good enough to win. And then some things I don't need to get really good at. I can ignore them and get out of people to do them. But that learning velocity is an essential trait of great founders. And also, I would say an appetite for risk, or at least, you know, not an aversion to it. It's not a behavior. It's an actual, like, they don't mind the uncertainty.

17:20Paige Craig: Yeah, you eat risk every day. That's your diet. When you see a founder who's not making the course correction, how do you, as an investor, how do you move them off that heading and get them onto the right one? That's a great question because it's a delicate balance, right? We want founders that have high agency and really mostly want to tell us, screw off, don't tell me what to do. That's mostly the attitude we want. But we do need founders who have enough self-awareness and situational awareness to know when the advice, either our advice or the environment is telling them, hey, this thing that you thought you were like, because everyone knows you're never 100%, but you thought you're 95 % sure you should go this way.

18:01Paige Craig: Eventually, life smacks in the face enough and you realize, I can't solve it. I shouldn't solve it. This is the wrong direction. So when you look at founders who are going the wrong direction, sometimes you need to, I like to take the approach of asking them questions about the environment and taking time to reflect. Because ultimately, my job is not to tell founders what to do. My job is to be a great partner and help them think about the world and help them learn about how to think about the situations they're facing. So the best way I've seen it happen is we talk about this environment. We ask questions.

18:34Paige Craig: We say, hey, what if? What about that? Let's try some crazy stuff. And quite often that leads them, and I'll turn up the heat slowly, right? Because most of these are not, wow, if we don't pivot tomorrow, the business is over. It's more like we see this iceberg, but it's six months away. And the approach I like to take as an investor is, let's say, hey, I think there might be an iceberg out there, but we got six months. What do you think? And they might be like, that's not an iceberg. That's a bunch of birds. Okay, great. Then a couple weeks later, I still think we got an iceberg coming to us.

19:06Paige Craig: like, you know, that might be an iceberg. I'm going to think about it and, you know, I'll see if I'm going to turn the ship. I prefer that approach. Now, sometimes we run into situations where it's like, hey, man, if we don't change this, this business is over. Like the decision point is this week or the decision point is the next couple of weeks. So let's just sit down and ask ourselves, are we really going the right direction? And the way I usually frame it to founders is, are you so sure about the direction you're going that you will bet your entire business? Because we're now at the point, given resources and time, that if you say, I won't change course, you are betting your entire business and career on this.

19:47Paige Craig: So just tell me, are you willing, don't give me an answer now, but think about it. Are you willing to bet the entire business on staying the course or should we change? And so sometimes we have to have those discussions with people. But that's my approach is to help founders think about it. Now, the most extreme, I mean, I'll tell you, every business I've, every multi-billion dollar company, we've had 19 of them now, has mostly had some radical adjustment or sort of like moderate adjustment. So evolutions in customer and property approach or complete changes to the entire business. Most of those are founder driven.

20:26Paige Craig: driven. It's very rare that investors wake up and say, Hey, you know what? I've been watching your business through a straw hole and I have the answer to your problems. That's, it's mostly great founders. They come to the conclusion of, Hey, there's a problem. They brainstorm with their board, brainstorm with their advisors, but they must own the direction of their business. I do not believe in boards and VCs who tell founders, this is what you must do. Like our job is to be a great thinking thinker, a great mentor, a great coach to them and help those find those directions. So as an investor, uh, when a first time founder comes to you and says, you know what?

21:04We thought about it and we decided to kind of move off this thing. That's actually making us money and to, and do this instead. Um, because this pivot seems to make more sense than what we're doing right now. How open to that?

21:14Paige Craig: Are you incredibly open? We have a, an incredible company called Calvis. They are building the AI layer for security, and they're doing it by becoming a physical security, like security guards protecting homes and malls and businesses. And originally, we were getting, like, they launched a product, and they'd been working with a ton of security companies and companies that hire security firms. And one of their first products was a back office tool that let security agencies run their back office. It was one of the biggest obvious problems, which is most of these are small, medium businesses run by ex-security guys who don't really run that well of business.

21:53Paige Craig: And so payroll and back office sucked. They built a tool that let them run their back office and do the security work. And six, seven months in, we had great revenues from it. We also had revenues from the security side. But we realized the CEO came to me and said, hey, I have this huge book of business that's growing. It's amazing recurring revenue. but it's not the revenue that's going to make me a great company. And in fact, it's starting to feel like an anchor on our operations and an anchor on tech, but we don't really see a way to make great margin. And he's like, I think we should kill it.

22:29Paige Craig: And so we talked about it and he phased it out. And he gave away a large slug of revenue. And now the business is doing, he's about two years old, doing$6 million monthly, raising a huge round now. But he made the really hard decision six months in to give away several hundred thousand dollars of recurring revenue, which is very impressive to VCs when they see on paper, but it wasn't the right end stage for the company. Okay. And it wasn't, it sounds like it probably was more, it was a bigger struggle to come to you with that than for you to actually make the decision itself. That's a lot of, the pivot is a big deal.

23:02It's a lot of emotional way tied up in that. There can be.

23:05Paige Craig: Especially when you tell them to VC like, hey man, I'm going to, I'm going to give up some revenue, some serious revenue. Seriously. Um, um, how do you, in that first conversation, how do you assess character? How do you read people for this when you're just, because obviously they're putting on their best possible mask to make you, you know, want to go work with them. Yeah. Well, I think, so I know character is the hardest thing for us to get right assessing it and is the domain that has the most attributes that we look for. It is also in the domain to your point where people are pretty good at faking it.

23:41Paige Craig: Right? Like, everybody learns to play the, you know, like, you know, they know how to play the game. So we spend a lot of time. I teach all my partners 21 elicitation tactics. Prior to this, I was a Marine. I was in the intelligence community. I spent almost 13 years of my life in war zones in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. And I did a lot of work in the intelligence front. And so I teach my partners how to get to the truth without the sounders knowing what we're looking for. There's a lot of tactics there. I'll give you a couple that we use. So we use reverse chronology. So I'll chat with something and we'll start to go back in time.

24:20Paige Craig: People find it really hard, find it harder to lie when they're going back in time. The other thing we do across our 30, it's certainly about a 30-day process, is we and the other partners who talk to you, we all have a common system that we use to put in our notes and our records and transcripts. we look over and over again to ask about your life in different ways and we look for inconsistencies and then we start to dig into those inconsistencies and we also start to ask for like these like really concrete and verifiable truths right and so when someone starts to tell me about a same place thing they're solving we'll ask a little bit we'll ask for some clarity around details that you may not even think are important but we're looking for these concrete things to see if you lie, you don't lie about them.

25:05Paige Craig: There's a lot of tactics we use. At the end of the day, we're trying to get to know you and we're trying to get to understand the truth of your founder journey. It doesn't have to be clean. It doesn't, like no one has a great history. Everyone has a history, especially as founders, where you've gone off the rails on things. You've wasted time in things that didn't work. You've done crazy pursuits. So we are not looking for perfection. Our job is we say we are there to look for the truth. We want to actually understand your family journey. And to your point, character is incredibly tough. Also, I think how we think about character is probably very different, Rouse, but how you would think about character for your son or for a brother.

25:48Paige Craig: The character we look for, and we don't reveal the exact details, but we're looking for the strength and this purpose in a person that lets them go and achieve the hardest things in life and to lead others in the hardest missions. So we're looking for a certain type of character. We say we're not looking for people to be fathers and brothers or military commanders. We are looking for the character that is required for Greek founders to build multi-billion dollar companies. And a lot of that comes down to the ability to lead and pull through in the most extreme circumstances. What does it look like when a founder shows you that they don't have that?

26:33We're gone.

26:34Paige Craig: We're gone. Many of the things that we look for, one yellow flag, one red flag is all it takes. And we try to exploit, because we say 99.99 % no's, is to say, hey, thank you, but it's not fit for us. Or however we say it, we try to say it in the best way possible. When I was a very novice investor, I used to give people very direct feedback that we had win the Marine Corps. And I've learned most civilians don't want that direct feedback. So nowadays we just say, this is probably not a fit. What does execution actually look like when there is no product and there are no customers and there is no revenue?

27:15Yeah.

27:15Paige Craig: So in the early days, before there's any meaningful metrics, it's both you're getting the right talent on the bus. That's a key thing. And you're talking to customers and figuring out what is our initial prototype. What is the thing we're going to build for them? Now, if you're building a$300 ,000 Thomas, your initial product thing that you're going to build is very different from someone building an AI platform. That's just going to be software. But what we're looking for is every time we talk to you, and we generally talk to our founders, it's a minimum monthly engagement. But usually in that phase, when you're trying to find some product to build, and then when you try to get the product market fit, we're talking to you three, four times a month.

27:59Paige Craig: And sometimes even more, like we're really in the weeds and not writing you, but saying, hey, let's help. And so we're looking at, are you spending your time focused on understanding the customer need? Are you starting to clarify it? Are you asking the right questions? And then can we sit down and say, okay, have you had enough discussions that you can plant a flag and say? I think this is what they need. Let's go build this thing as quickly, cheaply as possible. It can be an ugly baby, but let's get it out there and let people use it. And that's what we try to drive people towards is getting that clarity around the customer's need, building something as quickly and roughly as possible, and putting it out there for the initial feedback.

28:40Paige Craig: That's one. And then the other one that often happens at this stage is that you need perhaps one or two, maybe even three, depending on what you're building. We funded laser weapons companies. We funded space delivery vehicles and autonomous ships. Sometimes these hardware companies need a couple of key hires to build that thing. And so we're talking to the founders about, hey, do you need help finding people? Do you need help on talent? Do you need us to go help you recruit or assess? We do that in the early days. It's unscalable. But in these first year, it's very important to have someone help you on the talent side.

29:11Paige Craig: And then we're really spending time helping you understand how you're talking to customers. Not how you're finding customers, right? and then we'll help you there, but more so what you're learning from them. And then we're talking to you about, is there anything else? Take up your time. You're like, oh, I'm going to conferences. I'm doing podcasts. And sometimes there's a need to do these other little things, but mostly it's like, no, let's kill everything that isn't obsessively focused on your customer and perhaps that really essential talent that you might need right now. And so a lot of what we do is the blocking and tackling of helping sounders understand how to think, how to act, how to organize their day, how to focus their resources, but not being prescriptive.

29:54Paige Craig: It's talking to them and understanding their life and saying, okay, well, most likely you don't need to be doing that thing, or you don't need to be doing this thing, but you do need to be doing this thing. And we work as very close mentors in that process. Got it. So in that first 90 days after a deal, I'm guessing you expect them that they They should keep going with the customer discovery process that they've already been doing before the check. What are the other generic priorities you have for them in that first 90 days post-check? It does depend on the stage. Sometimes we've met a team who's already six months in, so they have prototype.

30:30Paige Craig: Let's take the founder or founders who came to us really early to have an idea. What we expect, and it could be three to six months. It takes a while. We expect that something is built. If it's software, built faster. or if it's hardware, maybe a little bit longer, but you have built something that satisfies the customer. That's the first thing we need to see. Like you've built something. One of the big red flags is that founding team who just keeps putting off and putting off the building the thing the customers are going to use. That's it. Like, you know, nothing matters until you deliver the physical thing that your customers can use.

31:06Paige Craig: That's it. There's so many things you can spend time on that at the end of the day, put something in your customer's hands that they can give you feedback on. That's what we look for. And then after that, once you put it in their hands, it's this really simple cycle of put it in their hands, listen to them, learn from them, think about the things that they don't know need to happen and rapidly get this iteration cycle working where you build the best product you can and start to figure out the business model. But at our stage, we're not trying to optimize on price. We're not trying to optimize on business models.

31:35Paige Craig: We're trying to optimize on, does your customer love this thing that you've made? Haven't you created true value for them, right? And then we can figure out, like, people are worried, should I charge$19.99 or$89.99 or how much should I charge for my robot to do a mission? It's like, let's just find a customer who will pay us anything for this robot to do a mission. And then we can start to get to the next stage. The price will reveal itself, basically. Yeah, the business model, like all that stuff adjusts. But if your customers don't like the thing you're building, none of this other higher order stuff matters.

32:07How important of a signal is ability to hire for you? And that's huge. Okay. And how coachable is that?

32:16Paige Craig: It's coachable. So within our vision, so we look at vision. Part of vision is the ability to lead the business, but it's really the ability to communicate with stakeholders and sell a vision. The one thing that founders have that no one has to give you, it's a free resource, is vision, right? Your ability to sit down and translate your knowledge and your passion into words, into stories, is one of the greatest superpowers of founders, right? The ability to go out and convince the media, to convince employees, to convince partners, to convince stakeholders and ultimately customers and VCs like us.

32:51Paige Craig: It's the ability to sell a vision, right? Not being a total BS or not being a used car salesman, but the ability to sell that compelling vision is a talent that any founder can develop. But now for some of your more reclusive founders, it's hard. And some outgoing people, it's easy. But we do look for that. And it's the ability to go out and convince people to join your mission. The other thing we look for, which is separate from that, is the ability to recognize talent. And the final one is the ability to kill what you love. And that is quite often you'll recruit people and a CEO. One of the big jobs you have is to get people off the bus if they're not right.

33:35Paige Craig: right it's you know help adjust coach people quickly but quite often you'll have the time you have to get good people off the bus because they're truly not great and so we look at the ability to recruit people the ability to understand and judge talent and have a very high mark for talent and the ability to edit and cut the team as needed quickly and you have to do all three of those things is a great CEO. I've got a couple of minutes remaining, but I definitely want to ask before we wrap up, do you have a framework for how a founder can actually tell whether they're building something that's venture scale versus just, you know, a solid lifestyle business, as people like to say?

34:16Paige Craig: I think the simple rule is if it's not scalable and by scalable, I mean, can you create a system where this feature, because sometimes people say, oh, you're, you're just building a feature, but many times the us VCs were wrong with that. But if you can't sit down and take the thing you're doing today and extrapolate it to the enterprise point, are there millions of people that will use this? If you're doing enterprise sales, that's different. If you're doing government sales, it's different. But if the thing you're doing cannot be extrapolated to serve a global need, right? And you can't be uniquely one of the best or the best in that space, then it's not venture scale.

34:56That's very clear. I like that. I want to close with a founder self-assessment, making it really practical. If someone who's listening, they want to pressure test themselves this month. What's the best thing they should get out of that early customer discovery stage when they're talking to that first handful of people? Are they looking for -

35:13Paige Craig: It's a very clear commitment to use it in the short term. Like, hey, I'll use this thing next week if you can get it to me. and a commitment to pay if it meets certain standards. Like, hey, if that robot can work for three hours in the factory and not break down, I will pay you 10 ,000 bucks a month. Like that's what you want is someone who will commit clearly in the short term to using it. And that's important, the short term, not three years from now, but will commit in the short term to using it. And two, can give you the standards by which they would pay for it. If those things exist, then that can be a real customer.

35:46Okay.

35:47Paige Craig: And my last question. And this is where founders, a lot of founders don't want to go to the uncomfortable next step, which is like, oh, we met this factory owner that loves us. Okay. When do they want to use your thing? What do they want to use it for? What does it have to do to get paid? Oh, I didn't ask them about that. They just said they're willing to check it out. Who knows if that's actually true? And founders lie to themselves all the time because they don't go to that next level of asking the when, what does it need to do, and how much will you pay for it? everybody wants to get a yes, certainly.

36:21Paige Craig: So yeah, you know, you meet a girl in the bar, you're like, Hey, can we go out sometime? She's like, sure. She's like, Hey, do we, you want to go get dinner tomorrow? Right. There's a big difference between those two questions. Definitely. Um, my last question for you, another self-assessment test or pressure test. How do you, how do you assess how well you're operating as a team of just you and your co-founder? well i think one is culturally uh are you guys so are you guys or girls um are you dividing your work up right are you able to divide the work up and have someone who is actually in charge and someone who's doing building the thing so usually when we look at founders it's someone who's in charge of fundraising getting business done getting customers looking at the business side and the other person is building the product and the tech and then a three-person team it's usually one business leader, one tech leader, and a product leader.

37:16But I'd say the signs it's not

37:19Paige Craig: working, if you feel any resentment, or if you feel that your co-founder has resentment towards you, and you can feel the, like, you'll get that spidey sense, right? If you've got any spidey sense of all that things aren't working, I guarantee you, your co-founders feel the same, and you should talk about that. And that might be like, man, why is that person coming at 9.15 when I come in at 7.30? Or why is my co-founder leaving at 6 and I stay here till 10? If that ever happens, you should instantly talk about this and figure out, like, should we actually work together? Now, it's okay to argue, to yell.

37:54Paige Craig: I have founders who've built billion-dollar companies and punched holes through walls, but they were okay working like that. But culturally, you have to be in sync. You can't have one guy that wants to have a Zen yoga circle to discuss things, another guy that that wants to thrash and punch the walls. Your culture has to work for you as a team. And if you feel disconnected, then you probably are. I think the couple easy quadrants to look at as one time commitment, it takes an insane level of effort. It takes herchulene sacrifice to be a great founder. And if you and your co-founder can't put in the same level of effort, if it's off a little bit, you're probably the wrong people.

38:37Paige Craig: If that person isn't obsessively talented and good and has great judgment, to where you can just let them do what they need to do and you guys can connect once in a while to make sure you're on the same page. But if you're constantly questioning their judgment and if they're questioning yours and you guys can't get that trust thing working, then you have a major issue. And if you guys can't resolve differences and don't have a clear view as to who's in charge, then you have a problem. Paige, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the time. Thank you very much.

39:34Thanks for listening. Fun Build Scale is a production of Truth and Soul Media, LLC.