When a founder walks in, most investors reach quickly for the numbers. What is your revenue, your growth rate, your burn, your market size. These are reasonable questions, and we ask them too, eventually. But they are never the first questions, because they are not the ones that tell us who we are actually dealing with.

Before we ask what a company earns, we try to understand what a founder is made of. Not because character is a nice bonus on top of competence, but because in the kind of long, hard building we do, character is competence. The technology takes years. The setbacks are guaranteed. The moments where the easy path and the right path diverge are constant. Numbers cannot tell you how someone behaves in those moments. Only a different kind of question can.

So here, honestly, is what we are actually probing for.

We want to know whether a founder is genuinely trying to serve humanity, or merely to be served by it. This is not a soft question. It has hard consequences for how someone builds. A founder oriented toward service asks what problem genuinely needs solving and who is being failed by the current answer. A founder oriented toward extraction asks only what can be captured. Over a decade of building, these two people make thousands of different decisions, and the difference compounds into entirely different companies. We are looking for the first kind, and we have learned to tell them apart, because the service-minded founder lights up talking about the problem while the other only lights up talking about the upside.

We want to see a relentless pursuit of excellence and knowledge. Deep technology punishes the shallow. The founders who succeed are the ones with a genuine, almost restless hunger to understand their problem more deeply than anyone else, to master their domain not for the credential but because they cannot help it. There is a particular quality to someone who is chasing knowledge itself rather than just the outcome it might produce, and it is one of the strongest predictors we know of who will still be standing when the work gets hard.

We want evidence of ethical conduct, tested rather than professed. Anyone can state good values in a pitch meeting. What we look for is how someone has actually behaved when behaving well was costly, how they treated people who could do nothing for them, whether they cut corners when no one was watching. Because we are going to spend years alongside this person, and we are going to hand them real resources and real trust, and there is no version of that partnership that survives if the person at the centre of it is not fundamentally honest.

We want first-principles thinking. Deep technology rarely yields to received wisdom, because if the answer were already known it would already exist. We are drawn to founders who reason up from fundamentals rather than reaching for the standard playbook, who can look at a hard problem and think it through from the ground rather than pattern-matching to what worked elsewhere. This is rarer than it sounds. Most people, including most smart people, reason by analogy. The ones who can genuinely reason from first principles are the ones who build things that did not exist before.

And we want courage and patience together, because deep technology demands both at once, and they are usually found in opposite personalities. Courage, to take on a problem that might not yield, to make the hard call, to persist when the sensible thing would be to quit. And patience, to stay with a problem for the years it genuinely takes, to resist the temptation of the quick win, to build properly rather than fast. Courage without patience burns out. Patience without courage never starts. The founders we look for have learned to hold both.

Now, the fair objection: does this not risk becoming a purity test? Are we looking for saints rather than builders, filtering out the commercial drive that actually makes companies work?

No, and the distinction matters. We are not looking for founders who are indifferent to success or embarrassed by ambition. The best founders we know are fiercely commercial, and they should be, because a company that does not survive helps no one. Serving humanity and building a valuable company are not opposites; done right, they are the same act. What we are filtering for is not the absence of commercial drive. It is the presence of something underneath it, a reason for building that goes beyond the founder's own enrichment, a set of values that will hold when the pressure comes. Commercial hunger sitting on top of genuine values is exactly what we want. Commercial hunger sitting on top of nothing is what we have learned to walk away from.

The numbers matter, and we get to them. But numbers describe a company's past. Character predicts its future, especially over the long horizons we work in. So we ask the harder questions first. Who are you when the work is difficult and no one is watching. That answer tells us more about what this company will become than any spreadsheet can, and it is the one we most want to hear.