Specificity
Founders who describe their problem in precise operational terms — not market opportunity slides.
Ventures · Selection criteria
What makes a
great co-build partnership.
We're selective about what we take on — not because of volume, but because co-builds require long-term alignment. Here's what we actually look for.
The founder
Domain expertise we can't replicate.
The one thing we can't provide is deep knowledge of your industry and market. We can build a logistics intelligence platform — we can't tell you why logistics operations managers make the decisions they do. That knowledge has to come from you.
We look for founders who've spent years in the problem space — not people who've identified a market opportunity from the outside. The most successful co-builds we've done involved founders who knew the failure modes of their industry better than we knew how to code.
8/8portfolio companies founded by domain experts
The idea
A real problem, not a solution looking for one.
The best co-build pitches describe a problem in specific, observable terms: “Our factory managers spend 3 hours every morning manually reconciling production schedules that change 4 times before lunch.” Not: “AI can transform manufacturing operations.”
We can validate product solutions. We can't validate whether the problem exists. If you can describe the problem in concrete operational terms and show that people currently pay money or time to work around it, we're interested.
The market
Defensible access to early customers.
We're not investing in ideas — we're co-building products. For that to work, we need to be able to talk to early customers during development, not after launch. Founders with existing relationships in the target industry give us that access.
This doesn't mean you need a pre-signed letter of intent. It means you can introduce us to 3–5 potential early users who will give us real feedback during the build.
What rules you out
Honest about what doesn't work.
- Ideas that require a large initial user base before they're useful (cold start problems)
- Consumer social products — we build B2B and B2B2C, not social networks
- Founders who want us to validate the idea for them — that's your job
- Products that are a thin wrapper around a single API with no defensible differentiation
What we value in founders