What Founders Ask Us Before Applying

This week’s big ideas

🎤SR007 Demo Day was yesterday! Troy Kirwin shares a behind-the-scenes glimpse.

🤖Congrats to SafeWorld (SR006) on raising a $12.2M seed to make robots safe

🌉SF Tech Week started Monday, and Rose Johnson has the highlights

Every application cycle, we hear versions of the same questions: We don’t have traction yet. Our video isn’t very polished. Should we still apply?

Applications for SR008 open next Monday, October 12. To help you prepare, Andrew Lee (speedrun partner) sat down with four of our investors who’ll be reviewing your applications to talk through the process.

Here’s what four of our investing partners – Troy Kirwin, Emily Bennett, Kenan Saleh, and Seeam Noor – had to say.

“Should I wait until I have the perfect idea?”

KENAN: The most important thing is that you’re fully bought in on wanting to start a company, and you’re willing to leave your job and do it full time. Other than that, we’re very flexible in terms of where you can be – how much traction, development, all that stuff. We will go almost as early as possible. We’ve invested in lots of people before they left their jobs. We give them the inception funding for them to quit their jobs and build full time.

TROY: Some folks wait until they have the perfect idea to take the jump. We often encourage them: if you know who you want to build with and you have a co-founder, that’s all you really need. Rather than spend your nights and weekends trying to find an idea and validate it, go 150% toward running at this idea and validating it. Don’t wait.

“We don’t have traction yet.”

This is fine, and more common than you’d think. Troy told us about a team he passed on last spring. They found a stronger idea and landed three highly respected people in their space as advisors. When they re-applied, what got them in was the match between the idea and the team’s expertise, rather than raw traction.

TROY: One of the most important things founders may misconstrue is the traction section of the application. Traction doesn’t have to be numerical, like “we have $100K ARR.” It can be, “We started on this idea two weeks ago, but in that time we’ve spoken to A, B, and C – important people who helped validate it and who’ve expressed interest in being advisors.”

KENAN: We’re looking for the slope of the team. When you see traction dots, you can extrapolate. But pre-traction, you might look at other forms of slope: how much are they learning about the business every time you talk to them? What was their slope like at their previous jobs? You’re just looking for slope somewhere.

SEEAM: And if you have the numbers, then include them. But if you don’t and you’ve made a lot of progress, progress can be qualitative.

“I’m not sure what to say about myself.”

TROY:We probably spend 80% of our time looking at the team and bio section. We want to see the things that maybe don’t shine through on a LinkedIn page: what makes you unique, and the signals that you have the grit, the tenacity, the ability to ship things zero to one. A lot of founders struggle to brag about themselves. So if you show your application to somebody else, have them look at the bio section and call out, “Why didn’t you mention that research paper, or that you have 30,000 Twitter followers?” We’re not looking for a picture-perfect resume.

SEEAM: We do really mean it when we say the team has the highest weight. A lot of people don’t believe that. Say you have a 20-minute chat with a founder, and it somehow becomes 45 minutes. In the second half, they might tell you stories – “This is the thing people don’t know about my story. This is my journey.” They might not put that in a formal application. Tell us that story. This is not the place to be humble.

EMILY: And don’t save it for the last 25 minutes. Catch me in the first two.

“Our video isn’t very polished.”

This is no problem. Kenan’s rule of thumb: if you had ten hours, spend 9.5 of them talking to customers and building product. Spend the remaining half an hour on the application.

KENAN: I wouldn’t overthink the video. Some people overproduce it. We just need you, or maybe you and your co-founder, talking earnestly about what you’re building. It’s really more a test of communication ability than the exact words you say.

SEEAM: I acknowledge that it feels high stakes. Maybe it takes a few takes, but we are not dinging on production quality. If the script is not polished, that’s fine. What we care about is who’s on the team and what progress you’ve made so far.

TROY: The main thing I’m looking for is storytelling and communication ability. The one thing to avoid is AI voice generation – that’s the exact opposite of what we want. We want to hear how you communicate.

“Is a 10-minute interview really enough time?”

KENAN: One opinion might be that ten minutes is too short to figure all of this out. But it’s not really about the ten minutes. It’s about all the hours you put in before the interview. That’s what makes it go well, and you can immediately tell if someone has put in those hours.

EMILY: That doesn’t mean you need a fully formed product, and it definitely doesn’t mean you need revenue. But on a call, you should be smarter about your topic than I am, because you’re spending time every day talking to folks and learning the nuances of your market. If I bring up a competitor, you should know about it. Those gaps are really solvable by exposure.

I also watch co-founder dynamics. When there are multiple people on a call, how do they engage with each other? How do they give each other space? How are you dividing roles, and how do you work together?

“We haven’t known each other that long.”

This one comes up a lot. It isn’t a dealbreaker, but what matters is time spent building together. If you met online, you may want to spend a week in the same room before you apply.

TROY: Twelve hours working together at a hackathon, where the biggest decision was McDonald’s or Burger King – that’s not necessarily high stakes. It’s the continuity and duration of time that builds mutual trust.

EMILY: That’s not to say the team can’t be successful – they just need time to confirm it. We’ve said no to teams who had only recently come together, and then they moved to the same place, worked out of the same office, and after six months they had context. That was sufficient.

KENAN: Even if they haven’t known each other long, I’ll look at whether they have similar life experiences – similar networks, jobs, schools – such that it would have been reasonable for them to meet. The Coinbase founders came together through a Reddit post, but if you look at their backgrounds, it wasn’t unreasonable that they’d have met at some point.

“What do we actually get with speedrun?”

TROY: What distinguishes speedrun from other pre-seed and seed funds is that you don’t just get one person – you get a whole team. Our team dedicated to speedrun is about 40 people, of which eight or so are investors. Our operating partners (the rest of the team) are the experts behind the scenes, helping with everything from launching and coming out of stealth to making your first hires.

KENAN: We’ve seen a lot of permutations, so there’s a good chance we’ve helped someone through what you’re facing.

SEEAM: Entrepreneurship is such a lonely journey, and you have to tolerate so much pain. When you have us talking to you as collaborators, plus the operating team and all these other founders, it’s much easier to sustain yourself during that pain, because everyone’s seeing it. You’re not alone.

That’s it for this week! Applications for SR008 open next Monday, October 12. Early apps get the first look, so don’t hesitate to apply.

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