I invest before real evidence exists, which means I’m making a commitment to a founder on potential, not proof. Before product-market fit. Before the team is fully built. Before the market is ready for change — or maybe even exists. That’s the essence of seed investing. Anyway you slice it, it’s going to be a long journey.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since writing about the inevitable founder — that feeling I get when someone sits across from me and I sense, before I can articulate it, that this person was put on earth to build this thing. I believe that feeling is real. I’ve felt it enough times to trust it.

But here’s the part I sit with: many successful founders can seem inevitable in the rearview mirror. When a company works out, the narrative can fit perfectly around the person. The obsession, the insight, the grit, the timing, the market — it all makes sense in hindsight. The hard truth as a seed investor is that I make the call before any of that clarity exists — and sometimes I’ll be wrong.

Being an authentic founder with conviction is an edge — but not one that guarantees success. And for me as an investor, being able to read that authentic conviction is my edge. At the earliest stage, with the least information, one of the most distinct signals I have is whether something true is driving this person. Whether they couldn’t not build this. But even the most authentic founders still need a real market, real timing, real luck.

As an investor, meeting the right founders at the right time matters. Maintaining my network, proactively finding great companies, and staying top of mind have become increasingly table stakes. All this makes what happens in the room matter more — the ability to feel something true about a person when almost everything I’m evaluating is potential, not proof.

At the earliest stage, if you’re not reading the person, what are you actually reading?

Which brings me to what I keep turning over as AI gets better at everything: what a human brings to that seat that AI can’t.

I think the honest answer is presence. The ability to be in a room — or on a call — and notice what isn’t being said. The way someone’s energy shifts when they hit the thing they actually care about. The difference between a founder who is performing conviction and one who is living it. These aren’t things you can easily screen for. They show up in real time, between people, in the small moments that don’t make it into a memo.

AI can’t replicate that yet. Maybe it will eventually. But right now, the earliest stage of venture — pre-traction, often pre-product, just founders and an idea — is one of the last places where human presence is genuinely irreplaceable.

And even then, I hold both things at once. The felt sense of the person. And the structured reasoning and thoughtful process behind the decision — the research, the referencing, the market, the timing, the magnitude of the problem. Intuition without judgment is just a feeling. Judgment without intuition misses the thing that matters most at the beginning.

That combination — presence plus rigor, feeling plus thinking — is what I bring to evaluating the earliest companies.

Models can process more data than I ever will. But at the earliest stage, before mountains of data exist, what I’m really evaluating is a human. And reading one takes another one.