Entrepreneur Equation

When you look at the leaders of fledgling companies, young companies, what are the characteristics that you look for in a startup CEO and how do you determine if the CEO has those qualities? Especially for someone who is super young and doesn't have a big resumŽ behind him or her?

It's easy when you're a serial entrepreneur. When you meet with a serial entrepreneur who has had several exits and is presenting you with his or her next great idea, a couple of references later, you can pretty quickly verify that he or she is the real deal.

What if it's someone who has never done it before?

That's much harder. That's much harder. And you go in knowing that you're taking a much bigger risk. We tend to invest in young entrepreneurs early knowing that it could be a binary outcome, that there's going to be a steep learning curve for everybody, particularly the entrepreneur. But there's some tells. There's no question there are certain things that we look for.

How do you identify?

You look for confidence. Well, first of all, you look for technical excellence. Does this person, he or she, have the training to pull off what they're proposing? So you look at their educational background and you look for technical excellence. And then it becomes a little bit... softer. It becomes a little bit less about maybe their IQ and more about their EQ. It's about whether or not they have natural confidence, whether or not they have the vision that I've talked about before. Whether or not they can create a narrative around that vision. Are they storytellers? Will people follow them? Will people understand what they want to get? What they want to accomplish? Will people get excited about it? Can they build a team to execute on their vision? Those are the sort of softer qualities that you look for in a young entrepreneur.