Yesterday, I led a private session with the Dorm Room Fund incoming partners. As an alum, it’s a privilege to do things like this and pay forward everything others gave to me when I started in venture.
I got a bunch of great questions, but one stood out:
“What have you seen to be the most important factors when you distinguish between an A* and A founder?…What’s your advice on how to ramp up one’s bar faster?”
Open sourcing my answer here:
“Hey xxx,
Great chatting with you all today. Really fun question, here’s my take:
The biggest factor that separates A* from A founders, in my experience, is the ability to identify, attract, and retain top-tier talent and earn the respect of the best engineers. An A founder can build a great product. An A* founder builds a magnet; the best people want to work for them, not because of the idea, but because of who they are. I’ve seen this firsthand with founders across our portfolio. The ones who consistently win are the ones who can pull in talent that’s better than themselves and keep them in the room.
The second thing I look for is relentless drive to win combined with accountability for outcomes. A lot of founders are driven, but the A* ones take full ownership, good or bad. They don’t deflect. And they have a velocity to them that’s just different. You can feel it. They reason from first principles, they move fast, and they’re not afraid to do the unglamorous work.
A third differentiator: inevitability. The best founders don’t sound like they chose the problem, it sounds like the problem chose them. There’s a sense that they were always going to end up here. That kind of founder-market fit is hard to fake.
On raising your bar faster…honestly, I think the best shortcut is getting as close to great founders as you can, as early as you can. Backchannel them. Watch how they operate under pressure, how they communicate, how they treat people when things go wrong. Pattern-match against the best people you already know. I’ve found that having a mental “ceiling” — the single most impressive founder you’ve ever met — and measuring everyone against that person is a surprisingly effective calibration tool.
The other thing: be a founder yourself, even briefly. I spent years as an operator before investing, and being on the other side of the table makes you much more sensitive to how hard zero-to-one actually is. It makes you less easily impressed by surface-level signals and more attuned to the stuff that actually matters — agency, velocity, willingness to do unglamorous work, and the ability to earn the respect of people who are smarter than you.
And one myth I’d push back on: technical expertise does not a great founder make. Some of the best founders I’ve backed didn’t have the deepest technical background. Instead, they had the ability to surround themselves with people who did, and the leadership to channel that talent toward a real wedge in the market.
Hope this is helpful!
Mike”