Adam Shuaib

Every investor says they’re looking for outlier founders, until one actually cold emails them a deck. An entrepreneur with zero founder-market fit, who wasn’t employee number 8 at Google, no Stanfo...

Many of the unicorn founders we meet are fuelled by inner demons. There is a voice in their head that says they are not good enough, or an early memory of a parent/teacher telling them they would f...

One of the unspoken rules of VC is that blue-chip founder pedigree buys you time, credibility and the benefit of the doubt. But across 12yrs of data, we found that most unicorn founders were in fac...

One of the most revealing signals we found in outlier founders: they view their company as a pirate ship rather than a navy. This isn't just a stylistic choice; it reflects a fundamental refusal to...

One of the difficulties in evaluating a founder is deciding whether their confidence stems from genuine insight or instead from social adeptness/charisma. The former indicates a builder who has wre...

When we studied the founders who actually built generational companies, we noticed a strange psychological blend: they were simultaneously deeply humble and unapologetically arrogant. This isn't a ...

The personality type that repeatedly showed up in our research on unicorn founders wasn’t "leader" or “visionary.” It was "difficult". As children, we found most never did the group work activity ...

Over the last 6 years, we manually tagged 16,000 founders across a number of binary signals that indicated someone had lived outside the matrix: odd hobbies, extreme life choices, unusual upbringin...

After ten years of studying early-stage founders, the single rarest success trait we saw wasn’t genius or vision: it was pathological determination. Not the “I work hard” kind, but rather the “I wi...

Successfully nailing a seed raise is one of the hardest things to do as a founder. For almost 80% of founders, this will be the first time they have ever raised money, and most advice given to firs...

One of the biggest myths in VC is that billion-dollar companies are built by deeply experienced insiders. Among 1500 unicorn founders, almost 60% had no prior experience in the sector where they ev...

Most great founders have a clear “point of origin” story that explains why they were compelled to start a company, and why nothing else would cut it. But 99% of VC interactions with founders focus ...

Most startups don’t actually fail because the market is too small or because they run out of money; they fail because the founders quit too early. The rare ones who don’t quit almost always share s...

We backed Mantic earlier this year after being blown away by their ambitious take on one of the toughest problems in predictive modelling: using AI to forecast the future. Last month, they came 8t...

Many of the unicorn founders we’ve met are fuelled by inner demons. A voice in their head that says they are not good enough, or a memory of being told they would fail. There is often a very strong...

One of the unspoken rules of VC is that blue-chip founder pedigree often buys you time, credibility, and the benefit of the doubt. But across 10yrs of data, we found that most unicorn founders look...

We’re pleased to share that Episode 1 has led the $4M pre-seed round for Mantic alongside DRW and a host of world-class angels from the likes of DeepMind and Anthropic! Toby Shevlane and Ben Day a...

After 15 years of investing, our biggest learning is that truly great founders have something that is almost impossible to fake: deeply unconventional life choices and highly atypical personalities...

Every VC says they’re looking for outlier founders, until one actually walks in the door. An entrepreneur with no “founder-market fit”, no flashy AI background, no Harvard PhD and no previous time ...

The closer we looked at the people behind unicorn companies, the less sense the data made. Almost 60% had never worked in the same sector before launching their companies. Well over 50% didn’t have...