What venture capital investors really look for in founders

It’s never been a better time to be a founder in the UK, and the interest is growing. Enterprise Nation’s 2026 StartUp Ambition research found 41% of UK adults were thinking about starting a business, with 62% of people aged 25 to 30 planning to start a business this year.

Most of these businesses will not succeed, and far fewer will ever reach the stage of seeking venture capital (VC) funding. But this year’s data shows a shift where more respondents cited economic reasons, rather than ‘passion’, behind their ambitions as people respond to economic uncertainty by taking matters into their own hands. We call it ‘dissatisfaction’, and it’s one of the key character traits we look for in the founders we choose to work with.

1. Relentless curiosity

Albert Einstein is credited as saying: “The important thing is not to stop questioning.” He was offering advice on life, but could just as easily have been talking about entrepreneurship. The founders who change things are often the ones who couldn’t stop asking ‘why?’. They are restless, dissatisfied, driven to interrogate everything around them.

That doesn’t mean being difficult on a personal level. Many of the best founders we meet are charming. But beneath the surface is a relentless first-principles thinking that refuses to accept the world at face value. It’s that constant questioning that creates the commercial opportunity. So, one of the first things we look for in founders is a degree of intolerance. It’s a specific personal characteristic, and when it’s combined with genuine domain expertise, it becomes one of the most reliable signals we’ve found.

2. The square pegs

Second, founders often don’t quite fit in within more traditional organisations. For much of their lives, they are pushed to conform, in the classroom, at university, and throughout their careers. While this pressure works for some, for the “square pegs” this is often unconventionality their greatest strength.

The start-up world is, by its nature, unstructured, and the people who thrive in it are often those who create order from that disorder. They see what others miss, and build what others wouldn’t attempt. Ask for a character reference and you might hear: “Highly intelligent, but difficult.” In a corporate context, that’s a negative, but in the start-up world, it’s more likely to be a recommendation.

3. Overeaching ambition

Nik Storonsky (Revolut’s founder) once said that what motivated him in the early days was for Revolut to be “bigger than JP Morgan”. Those kinds of ambitious statements always sound fanciful and impossible… until they aren’t. Now, Revolut has secured a British banking licence and looks ready to take on those legacy institutions. Most of the best founders we look for have that outsized motivation to perform.

The most effective founders are, by nature, driven. When your livelihood depends on the success of your business, you don’t switch off. No VC investor, however committed, can replicate that level of involvement. Even the most dedicated VC operates across a portfolio, which creates an inherent degree of separation. That’s simply the reality.

Which is why the most valuable thing VC investors can offer a great founder is not guidance on how to run the business, but good old-fashioned capital. This gives founders room to test assumptions, adapt when needed and keep building. Beyond that, the best VC support is commercial: opening doors, making introductions and accelerating revenue-driving relationships.

4. A single-minded approach to success

Strong founders are intensely focused on execution, which is a virtue, but it can also narrow perspective. What a good VC investor can offer is something like a baseline reset helping founders’ step back from the day-to-day and encourage them to take a helicopter view. It’s a chance to have a clear-headed conversation about where the business is heading, and whether the longer-term objectives still make commercial sense.

Where our involvement as investors becomes more substantive is at the point of exit. The mechanics of selling a business are areas where we can add genuine value, precisely because we see these structures regularly. But even then, the founder remains in the driving seat. After a decade of building something from nothing, no one is more motivated, more informed, or more focused on getting the outcome right.

Do you have what it takes to build a VC-backed business?

If you want to become an early-stage founder, there’s really no reason not to go for it. The infrastructure and tools are increasingly there, and the result is a genuinely rich ecosystem of businesses being built across the country, many of which will never seek, or need, venture capital.

But if you take VC money, you will almost certainly work harder than you ever have before. Not you are forced too, but because you want to. There is no coasting, and there is no nine-to-five. The outcome, for better or worse, becomes part of who you are.

Knowing that, and choosing to do it anyway, is itself a signal that you might be exactly the kind of person who should be running their own start-up.

Seb Wallace is head of Triple Point Ventures.

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