The non-obvious traits I look for in founders

I've invested many times in founders I never met in person.

For me, it all started during the pandemic, when everything happened online: decks shared over email, calls held on Zoom, wires sent with a few clicks. I knew what each founder was building, of course; I'd read their markets, stress-tested their models. But I rarely got to meet the founder in person

Six years later, that baseline still holds, and most of it works fine. You can evaluate a market online, test a model on a call, get a feel for how someone thinks from the way they handle a hard question over a video interview. But how someone works when it's hard: when their brain is under pressure, when someone else is pulling ahead, when they're exhausted and there's still 3km to go. That doesn't come through a screen.

Those are the things I'm actually evaluating. So I take founders and investors on runs each month.

A run tests stamina, but stamina isn't what I'm measuring. It's the window. When the body is depleted, the performance drops, and you finally see how someone behaves with nothing left in the tank to manage the impression.

Six kilometres of honest effort strips away the professional layer. By km five, nobody is pitching. We all work around the clock, so by the time we're running together, work is the last thing anyone wants to talk about. That sense of loosening up is the whole point I’m after. Here's what surfaces for me in those moments:

Who pushes the pace when it costs them something

At kilometer five, legs are heavy, lungs are burning, and there’s still a couple of kms to go. Most people quietly let the group go ahead. Some don't. The founder who tries to push when pushing hurts is showing you the one thing no deck can fake: what they do at their limit,  not inside their comfort zone. I weigh this the most.

How they respond to someone else pulling ahead

The moment another runner speeds up the bar for everyone, you learn something instantly. Who rises to it, who resents it, who reads it as information. Everyone in this world is competitive – founders and investors alike. What separates people is what that competitiveness does to them under load.

Who checks on the person at the back

Somewhere in every run, someone falls behind. The founder who drops back to run alongside them, with no audience for the gesture and nothing to gain, is telling you how they'll treat a struggling teammate at 2am two years from now. Character is clearest when no one is keeping score.

And who showed up at all

The only entry criterion for one of my runs is that you turned up at 7am. Someone who set the alarm the night before, for a run with people they haven’t met yet, has already told you something about their relationship with effort before a word is spoken.

None of this is replicable in a designed setting, and that's the point. A retreat is a curated experience, and the curation has  real value. A run is the opposite. Nobody planned it, nobody facilitated it, nobody set an agenda. You showed up and moved through a city with strangers, and what surfaced, surfaced on its own.

The run is simply the sharpest version of a principle EWOR is built on. Several times a year, EWOR Fellows live together in Community Houses because you only truly get to know someone over sharing a kitchen, fixing a broken heating system together at 2am, or enjoying a dinner together that runs past midnight because nobody wants to leave. The emergency nobody planned for reveals who moves toward it without being asked. The midnight werewolf game reveals who stays calm when the room panics. Different formats, one logic underneath.

For me, the run is where I see such traits most clearly. And the people who keep showing up, in Cape Town, in SF and in Munich, or wherever I go, are the ones I want to build something with.

On 30 September, I'm hosting a run at Bits & Pretzels. If you're going to be there, come find me: https://luma.com/fomobitsrun