Narayan Chowdhury

We love to interview founders just about what are their priorities.

There was a time where we wondered, would the whole industry move towards kind of platform service companies, meaning everyone would look like an Andreessen.

And to some extent, the service offering at big scale, that has kind of played out a little bit, probably not at the Andreessen scale, but

offering talent partners, media strategy, capital markets professionals, that kind of has existed, but they're all playing at a different stage.

At the early stage,

Founders keep telling us, and hopefully we keep asking and we keep engaging and we keep refreshing this research, but they keep telling us that they care about sort of a minimal brand, firm brand viability.

So they're not optimized.

There isn't a list of five companies or five VCs that they think about.

But they do want to know that there's some stability that as I talk about my cap stacked with either of the customers or hires, it recedes and it's not an issue.

So there's some minimal threshold.

And beyond that, it is...

Are you going to run a sane and be respectful of my time process as we court each other?

Is your money good?

I got to pay these people.

Are you going to fund me in a timely manner and you're good for your capital?

And then can I stand to talk to you every day or every week for the next five, six years?

It doesn't get too much more complicated than that.

And so I think part of that, and that goes back to kind of that unicorn category of VCs with an established federated founder network that really cares about them, that they've demonstrated a lot of care and love for them at the very earliest, most difficult, unknowable parts of their company.

That is a really fascinating question of how much...

How much is the VC picking and how much is the founder picking?