Founder checklist

Getting your first (or any) venture funding can be an opaque process. In the interest of helping founders better understand what we’re looking for we want to be as transparent as possible about our process and investment criteria. We seek to give founders open feedback at each point, and also wanted to share some of the questions we ask internally when evaluating your business. 

Depending on what stage of business you’re at, you may not need to tick every box! However, we wanted to share a little on how we evaluate which businesses to invest in: 

1. Impact: As impact investors, this is the first thing we screen for. We won’t invest in ventures that don’t tick this box. 
   • Is impact core to the business? 
   • Is impact core to the founder? 
   • Can this business achieve impact at scale?  
2. Founding Pioneers: We seek to back Australian/ NZ pioneers, questions we ask here include: 
   • Is the founder compelling? (e.g. do you have an extraordinary vision? Is it your life’s work?) 
   • Is the founder coachable? There are twists and turns in any founder journey, will they be nimble enough to adapt to a changing environment? 
   • Is the founder capable? Do they have the right mix of commercial/ technical/ domain expertise?
   • Is there good founder-market fit? 
   • Does the founder show the ability to make surprisingly quick progress? Do they get things done? (this comes back to traction) 
   • Is the founder connected to the Alberts values?
3. Problem: Whilst execution is more critical, we do look for founders solving real problems. 
   • Is the problem clearly articulated?
   • Is the problem acute for the target audience? 
4. Market: We’re conscious that market size can be a moving piece, however, we look for businesses we believe can 10x, as such some markets are just too small for venture capital. 
   • Is the market potentially big enough? 
   • Why now?
   • Is the tide rising? Is there momentum in the market? 
5. Solution: This is a strategic question on whether it’s the right solution to the problem. 
   • Is the solution unique? 
   •  Is it multiples better than the status quo? 
   • Is the solution defensible? (Is there unique IP? Is the business building a competitive advantage?) 
6. Traction: How we look at your traction depends a lot on your stage, there are very different expectations for pre-seed vs Series A companies.
   • Early evidence of product-market fit 
   • Other progress (e.g. strong hires) 

 Whilst no check-list is foolproof, if you’re ticking most of these boxes, you’re very likely to get a meeting with us 😊