We see roughly six hundred Series A opportunities a year and take first meetings on about sixty. Before we take any of those meetings, we try to answer four questions from public information: the company's own materials, the founding team's background, the customers they sell to, and the product they sell.
The first question is whether the company has a working product. We define working as: a customer is paying for it, the customer is using it at least weekly, and the customer would notice within a day if it stopped working. PowerPoint products and pilot-only products do not count. We can be flexible on revenue, but not on this.
The second question is whether the company has a repeatable sales motion. We do not require it to be scaled. We do require that the founder can describe, in one sentence, how a new customer is acquired, and that the answer is not founder-led outbound alone. Founder-led sales is a great way to find the first ten customers and a bad way to find the next hundred.
The third question is whether the market is structured in a way that supports a vertical winner. Vertical software markets are usually small per customer, deep per workflow, and slow to consolidate. We look for markets with at least five thousand potential customers, a clear workflow we can own, and limited competition from horizontal platforms.
The fourth question is whether the founding team has a real reason to be in this market for ten years. The best signal is usually a prior career in the industry the company serves. The second-best signal is a prior company in an adjacent workflow. The worst signal is a slide that says the founders are passionate about the space.
If we can answer all four questions before the first meeting, we take the meeting. If we cannot, we usually pass. It saves the founders time and it saves us time.