Trae (Trey) Stephens

My first year at Founders Sun, I did 500, just over 500 pitch meetings, which is a lot.

Wow.

You know, I've ratcheted that down a bit.

I have a better sense for the types of things that are going to be a good fit.

But, you know, it's a big part of what everyone in this industry does is you're just meeting with really compelling people day in and day out.

Well, you know, this is probably like the most common question that VCs are asked because I think people really want to believe that there's a rubric, that there's like some sort of table.

And in the meeting, I've just got the table out and I'm like checking off, like, do they have this trait?

Do they have this trait?

In reality, it doesn't really work like that.

There's something that's way more gut and intuition-based where within about five minutes of a pitch meeting, you can get pretty dialed to know, okay, this is one that we might take a shot at.

There's something...

really vibrant about this person.

There's something that's super differentiated about this person.

Peter wrote a book called Zero to One.

In the book, he said that, you know, we're all drawn into mimesis.

And so like most normies are, they're just aping what everyone else is doing.

And so they're, you know, they want to be like the Uber for X or something like that.

But the really generational transformative founders are the people who aren't tied into

peer group validation.

And they're going to do weird stuff.