Every once in a while, I meet a founder who feels inevitable.

It’s hard to describe. Somewhere in the midst of that first meeting, I get the sense… this person was put on earth to build this thing. Not “this is a great insight.” Not “impressive team.” Something more like a force of nature sitting across from me. I can feel it before I can articulate it.

The only word I’ve found that gets close is authenticity — not in the polished, on-message sense, but something more essential. A kind of inevitability. This person couldn’t not build this.

My partners have been writing about authentic founders for years — that the best companies are born out of something deeply personal and true. I think that’s more true now than ever.

I had that feeling recently. And I’ve been thinking about it ever since — especially in the context of what’s happening right now with AI.

Here’s what I keep coming back to: AI is making it easier than ever to look like the real thing early in a process. Which means looking like the real thing matters less and less.

A polished deck can be produced in an afternoon. A tight narrative, a crisp problem statement, a strong “why now”… all of it is table stakes. The noise floor has risen dramatically.

And that means the signal that’s left is the thing that was always the real signal: something true about this person and why they can’t not build this thing.

Sometimes it’s seeing a loved one struggle with a really hard problem. Sometimes it’s a decade of watching an industry from the inside and finally having enough. Sometimes it’s a hobby that becomes an obsession. Whatever it is, I can feel their truth long before I could ever put it into words.

AI doesn’t diminish that. If anything, it amplifies it. It’s making their truth more powerful — not less. An authentic founder — someone with real conviction and real insight — can now get to proof of concept faster than ever. They can scale things that were previously unscalable. They can build a company that literally couldn’t have existed before.

And that’s what makes this moment so interesting to me. Are we at the beginning of a wave where the most authentic founders — the ones who have been quietly obsessed with a problem for years, who couldn’t not build this thing — finally have the tools to match their conviction? Ideas that were too hard to execute, too capital-intensive to test, too dependent on engineering resources they couldn’t afford… some of those ideas are now within reach. I find that genuinely exciting — and a little complicated.

Because AI also makes it easier to look authentic on paper. And that noise only compounds in a world where AI will automate much of what we do in venture — sourcing at scale, pattern matching, and research. Identifying a founder’s authentic conviction is the hardest thing to automate.

Which perhaps makes the ability to feel it — that gut recognition that this is someone who will run through every wall in their way — more valuable than ever.

I don’t know exactly how to train that. I’m not sure you can. I think my fifteen years of reps as a day one investor help. So does learning to create space in a conversation — to resist the urge to project, to ask questions driven by true curiosity rather than a checklist, to really listen before reaching for a pattern.

And here’s what I’ve noticed: the founders who have that truth in them know how to take that space.

It’s not that they talk about themselves more, or spend less time on the proof points. It’s something subtler. It’s how they show up in their own story. There’s an ease to it, an ownership. They’re not performing the founder. They just… are one.

AI can generate almost everything now. But it still can’t generate that deep, personal, almost irrational compulsion to build.

This is the first in a series of essays I’ve been writing about what stays human in early-stage venture, as AI changes the work around us.

Part 1: The Inevitable Founder — on the felt sense that a particular person was meant to build a particular thing.

Part 2: Feeling and Thinking — on potential, not proof, and why presence matters.

Part 3: After the Wire — on what changes when the money lands, and what doesn’t.