On signals from exceptional founders

In the past 6 months here at Work-Bench, we've met with hundreds of founders and pre-founders building in enterprise software, SaaS, dev tools and infra at Seed.

Every VC firm will tell you that they look for exceptional founders - but what does this actually mean??

For us, there are a few key signals we've seen in the founders that we have backed and led Seed investments in:

• Fast velocity ➡ this is evidenced by the number of early scrappy experiments you've run and shipped (and the lessons that have come from it). One of our founders talked about how they got their way into a highly specific and relevant user conference for free, where they landed 5 qualified leads.

• Disciplined, clear thinker ➡ I cannot underscore this enough: when a founder ships clean materials - a thoughtful memo, a clear deck, clean pipeline - it demonstrates process/organization, ability to communicate/tell a story/articulate a vision, strong command of metrics, and more. Your dataroom says a *lot* about you as a founder - so your effort here goes a long way!

• GTM-oriented ➡ we love when founders can share customer Gongs with us as 1. we can hear from customers directly on the depth of their pain points 2. we can understand and assess how early sales conversations are going (and how we might be able to help!). Ideally founders have talked to 100s of potential users/customers by the time we meet.

• Creative ➡ one of our founders shared how they used fax (!) to get to some of their earliest customers. Our best conversations are jamming and hearing some of the creative things you've tested to get to your earliest customers at Seed - and sharing tips and tricks and playbook pages from our portfolio and community too.

As a reminder, here at Work-Bench - we lead $3-4M Seed rounds in enterprise software, SaaS, dev tools and infra companies - but our best conversations with pre-founders are often collaborative. If you're here in NYC and thinking through a massive pain point and you believe "there has to be a better way," we'd love to chat 👋