What We Look for In Applications
a16z speedrun investors sat down to discuss the positive signals that set founders apart, common mistakes, and other advice for founders.
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Our team recently completed our review of applications for SR006, which is set to kick off in person later this month. We considered over 19,000 startup pitches and under 0.4% were ultimately selected to join our startup program.
What do we look for when reviewing these applications, and how can founders improve their application to increase the odds of getting selected?
We sat down recently with the team of investors who reviewed applications for SR006 to extract lessons that might be helpful to founders to apply to the next batch, including:
What positive signals set founders apart?
What are common mistakes founders make that hurt their chances?
What are things you wish you’d see founders doing more when they apply?
The resulting roundtable discussion is presented below as a lightly-edited transcript.
On Cofounder Relationships
RYAN RIGNEY (Marketing Partner): I’ll start with the same question I asked last time: what positive signals did you guys look for when reviewing applicants for SR006?
FAREED MOSAVAT (Visiting Partner): Emily’s got a good one she tweeted about today, so why don’t you kick it off?
EMILY BENNETT (Investment Partner): I’ve seen two dissolutions of founder teams recently—both from teams where the founders had recently met each other.
So this has been more of a calibration for me coming out of this cohort: find co-founding teams that really know each other and have depth of relationship. That can mean a lot of things—maybe they worked together at the same company, they’re college roommates, or they used to code together in high school. That shared history creates better sustainability and deeper context, which has lasting impact. It’s not that new pairings can’t work—they can—but founders should first look to people they already have reps with.
Velocity And Traction
MARCUS SEGAL (Investment Partner): I’m always happy to see velocity. Velocity and traction are not exactly the same thing. Velocity is: How fast are they developing, releasing, and learning? Traction’s another story. Not all traction is created equal by the way.
RYAN: Say more on that point.
MARCUS: There are probably ten different ways to express traction—getting an influencer to be an advisor or reference you in a post is probably the lowest level of traction appeal to me. Obviously revenue is great, but it’s not a pre-requisite for speedrun. I’m always happy to see founders talk to potential customers or find design partners to engage with a rough product. That says a lot. That says to me this is a high-hustle founder who is making sure that what they’re building is directionally something that customers want.
SAM SHANK (Visiting Partner): On traction, I’m looking for signs of product-market fit. It’s one thing if someone’s using your product. If it’s like, “Hey, we’re trying this out, we’re on a demo, this is a design partnership.” But we’d prefer to see you move up the stack in terms of quality of traction. Short-term revenue contracts are moving up one level. But long-term recurring revenue with significant companies—that’s the best. It indicates you’ve got something of real, durable value.
The Value Of Ideas And Insight
FAREED: On that note, one thing I’ve been mulling over is the value of ideas. One of my contrarian positions is I think ideas matter more than a lot of people think they do. The reason ideas matter is that they’re the first evidence that this team is effective. How did you come to this idea? Why is this important to you? What have you done to validate it?
Ideas on their own aren’t valuable; I am interested in the process by which you got to this and why you think you’re the right team to build it. What’s that earned insight? What’s the secret you’ve learned? What’s that thing you can teach me that I wouldn’t have otherwise seen? We see a lot of ideas in the same space, over and over again. My instinct is that those are tar pits: obvious things that lots of teams see. So I’m looking for non-obvious stuff. If you’re at the earliest stages, I want to see that real thinking went behind your decision to work on this problem for the next 10 years of your life. .
I’m going to push on the “why.” Why is this what you’re working on? What have you learned? Who have you talked to? What have you changed your mind about? That tells me these are founders who are going to be truth-seekers.
EMILY: Yeah, going after a space that seems obvious…you have to ask yourself: what’s my unique insight? A lot of companies are going after fintech as a market, but you need to communicate and really to have an angle that feels differentiated, that you’re uniquely positioned to serve.
KENAN SALEH (Investment Partner): I think the ideas do matter. I would actually much rather see really great validation at the early stage than small amounts of traction. Sometimes we see companies get a few customers with small amounts of traction, but they haven’t validated the rest of the market and it’s unclear where to go from there. I’d rather see much stronger validation, even without a product or paying customer.
RYAN: If I’m a founder hearing this phrase “validation,” I might have trouble separating it from just straight-up revenue. How do you split those, or how do you get validation without it just being increased revenue from customers?
KENAN: What we’ve seen teams do well is talk to a large number of customers and get those customers to indicate interest early on—sometimes hard interest, sometimes soft interest, sometimes just verbal interest. The magnitude of customers they speak to really helps. You get a sense of how important the problem is and of customers’ willingness to pay. There’s a difference between customers barely responding to your email, where you have to beg them to talk to you, versus customers who are excited and introducing you to their friends and talking about you to other people. There are small qualitative signals you pick up along the way.
Two other signals I like: people who really know the history of the market and the industry. When they can tell you why certain companies were successful, what was tried in the past, why certain companies failed—that’s always a really good signal. And second, people who go meet all the players in their industry. We had one team come to us this week who basically said, “Here are 30 people in all parts of the industry that we’ve met.” Some were customers, some could be advisors, some could be investors, some were other founders doing a similar type of business. They had mapped out and talked to all these people, and that was a really great signal.
TROY KIRWIN (Investment Partner): Yeah, I’d double-click on that. Who have they hustled themselves in front of to ask the questions and get up to speed on the market? There’s historical precedent for this—the Robinhood founders went and met the founder of Visa during their ideation stage. Even if it doesn’t end up being the end-all be-all, it’s a signal that these founders will also be able to get in front of the right customers, get in front of the right talent, and have that magnetism required to be a successful founder.
EMILY: And I think drilling down on “is this a real problem” is key. A mistake I’ve seen is founders who hop onto calls and over-productize—they lead with a solution and try to get a response. That’s actually not the right approach in the early stage. The right approach is to listen, to actively listen, and try to understand what’s the root problem that’s most acute for this customer. That is the deepest validation—then mapping that out into the more tangible indicators of velocity.
“Outsider” Founders And Doing The Work
MARCUS: One thing that’s interesting about the time we’re in now—and Troy had a great post about this—is we’ll see an outsider founder come in who has not worked in an industry before, and they do the work. They talk to the customers, and they become subject matter experts. They come in with this outsider view and disrupt an industry. We’ve also seen insiders who’ve felt the pain come up with solutions. But sometimes the insiders who’ve felt the pain think they know everything and do not ask enough questions of other companies, and that could be a trap.
TROY: Sometimes the insiders fall in love with both the problem and the industry, whether or not there’s meant to be a generational company built there. Take that versus the outsider who comes in and is obsessed with the pursuit of truth and figuring out and validating whether or not the company should exist.
JOSH LU (General Manager, a16z speedrun): An amalgamation of the last two ideas, around the idea maze and the competitive space: I really like founders who are maniacal about understanding what the competition is and why all of their competitors will fail. Sometimes we’ll see a slide that’s a Harvey Ball comparison of all the competitors and features: “Look, we have more green checkmarks than everybody else.” But that’s actually not a real competitive analysis. Having a very deep understanding of who is everybody else thinking about this space, why your unique insight is correct, and why consequently everyone else is going to hit a brick wall—that’s a very good way to articulate that you’ve gone deep down the idea maze.
FAREED: A lot of this is: if you’re an outsider, what we want to see is that you’ve done the work. You’ve really researched, you’ve thought about it, you care about it. The Anchr guys (SR005) are a good example—they identified an industry, they have some insider perspective from their consulting time, but they’ve done the work. They know everything about the market, who the players are, who knows who, what the specific problems are. If you’re an insider, the question is: why doesn’t this exist, given that you know this market really well? What’s your unique viewpoint? What’s the secret you already know that no one else knows?
SAM: Some of the best pitches I’ve received—when I had a question about the market, they said, “Well, let’s go to the next slide.” They had anticipated the question already. They were that prepared for someone coming in who doesn’t know the market as well. They were ready to give that education. They’d done all that work.
Have All The Good Ideas Been Taken?
TROY: A question I keep getting from founders is: “Okay, we’re a couple years into the AI wave. Do you feel like all the best ideas have been taken at this point?” I’ve gotten that question a lot, and my answer is that I’m consistently surprised by great ideas we see during speedrun, ones where I think, “Wow, I wish I had thought of that.” And as there are tectonic shifts in the underlying infrastructure layer, new pockets and windows of opportunity open. For instance, we’ve seen a lot of activity and interest in agentic commerce this wave, and a new wave of AI in fintech companies.
EMILY: Yep. And robotics.
Our Interview Process And What We Look For
RYAN: I want to ask something I didn’t ask in the first article. A lot of people want to know more about our process. They understand they need to fill in the application, and typically the next step is we’ll request a video, then a small percentage of applicants make it through to an interview. What are the things you’re typically trying to dig in on at that interview stage? Are there common or recurring themes?
KENAN: The most important thing in the interview is how effectively the founders communicate their vision and articulate their value prop. The reason that’s important is you need to articulate what you’re doing in a way that’s interesting enough for somebody to stop their life and go buy your product—which is not easy given all the things competing for people’s attention. Can you do that at different levels? It’s the initial one-liner, and then when we ask different types of questions from different angles, can you produce it on the fly? That’s what I look for personally.
EMILY: The thing I’d add is: can you brag about yourself in a way that builds deep conviction that if there are 50 teams trying to tackle this, you are the one that’s going to unlock it? That’s uncomfortable for a lot of people. But lean into why you are special—that’s your main selling point.
MARCUS: Think of your interview more like a great movie trailer. We have 10 minutes with you to decide if we want to spend half an hour or an hour with you to go deeper. I’ve seen founders waste a lot of time introducing an advisor or all six people on the team on a call. What really matters is that you can convince us in a 10-minute call that your idea and vision is compelling and that your team has what it takes to win.
SAM: It’s not only imperative to be able to do that within a 10-minute window because every word matters in this movie preview—it’s also a skill you’re going to need. You need to describe your company in a very pithy, condensed way, in one sentence. If you can’t do that already, it’s a question about your ability to be a great founder going forward.
JOSH: Building on Emily’s point from earlier about founding teams: one of the things I look for is founder chemistry. Whether the founders are cutting each other off, or when we ask a question there’s an awkward silence to see who takes it. We often ask what are the really hard decisions you’ve had to make and how were those made. Having really clear, defined roles also helps us understand that the founders have worked through some conflict together.
EMILY: I also like founding teams where they’re clear counterparts—they solve for each other’s gaps. Some of that is business-specific. For example, if you have a B2B business and there’s going to be a sales element, it’s helpful to have someone who’s commercial. It doesn’t need to be both founders. But there needs to be someone that fills that essential gap for your business.
TROY: I also find myself trying to suss out whether particularly more technical founders are obsessed with the product or if they’re a student of company building. Sometimes we’ll ask, “Hey, who are the first couple of hires going to be?” And they’ll respond, “Well, we can build it ourselves,” and haven’t put any thought into how they might construct the team or set the culture. Even if that’s true and they can spend the next six months building themselves, it’s an important signal to understand that they’ve begun studying how other early teams have formed, what best practices they want to instill around hiring. And the same parallels are there for how they want to approach fundraising and capitalization.
Common Mistakes and Missed Opportunities
RYAN: I’ll move to our last topic: common mistakes we see founders making in their application. There are two ways to tackle this. There are issues that turn you off from an application that maybe could have been avoided. And then there are the things you wish you’d see more of, the things that maybe people aren’t aware they should be doing. What are those mistakes or missed opportunities we’re seeing in applications?
FAREED: Not talking about the team enough is a common one. People get enamored with the idea and the product and don’t spend enough time talking about why they’re the right people to build this.
EMILY: And the reverse of that is spending too much time on the product itself without talking about why it really matters. A lot of people will pull up a demo and spend five minutes walking us through it, but that doesn’t communicate the problem you’re trying to solve and why what you’re building is important.
MARCUS: Too much time spent on the TAM. You see these apps with overblown TAMs where it’s like, look, you’re not going to convince us that every man, woman, and child wants your app or SAAS. So please do not try. We know where there’s a market.
KENAN: I’d add to Emily’s point: highlighting differentiation, especially if you’re building in a category with a lot of existing startups. Sometimes I’m reading an application and thinking, “This sounds like X company,” and I’m struggling to figure out what’s different. Making that really clear is very helpful—say “we’re different from XYZ because of this,” rather than making the reader do that exercise themselves.
TROY: Something I’d like to see more of in applications: what have you done to validate this idea? Who are the impressive experts (buyers, advisors, former founders from the category) you’ve hustled to? If you’re an “outsider,” have you found an “insider”? In the very earliest stages, that’s a form of traction. At least these are folks you might eventually be able to circle back to and sell into or through, even if you’re two weeks into the idea.
MARCUS: Adding another layer to Troy’s point, I think that if you’re going to spend years of your life building something, if you’re going to pull in other people, if you’re going to raise millions of dollars—you should want to do this kind of work ahead of time, because this is a chunk of your life that you are talking about.
EMILY: And I’d say having a tangible plan. We often ask: what are you prioritizing right now? What are you going to spend time on over the next year, over the next three months? Have both a quantitative answer—knowing your metrics—but also a team-building answer. Who are the next hires you need to make? Just show that you’re action-oriented and there’s forward thought around that.
SAM: Something I’m always shocked to see is typos in applications. It’s a minor thing, but it’s like putting a typo in your resume—it’s bad attention to detail, especially in today’s world where everything can be checked very easily. Two other things I’d look for: one, make sure you don’t bury the lead. If you do have great news—a great design partner, strong ARR—put it front and center, don’t put it at the bottom of the list. And second, if you’re doing a weird idea, one that’s going to take time but could change the world, you need to help pull us along on your vision of the future. In a world where X happens, we’re gonna need Y. Make sure that’s part of your pitch, especially where it’s not going to have ARR because that’s a real moonshot.
RYAN: Last time Marcus had a funny one, which was “People are just rambling—come on, tighten it up, run it through ChatGPT if you have to.” I imagine there’s a lot more ChatGPT that we’re seeing in applications this time. Do you guys have a view on this? Does it impact how you judge the communication skills of the applicant?
EMILY: You should use AI to distill thoughts and make things more concise. Everyone should be using AI to streamline their work. But the unique framing of a space, a market, an opportunity should come from you. The validation needs to come from you. The insights are personal; the delivery can be AI-assisted.
MARCUS: A great prompt to use for your application would be: “Apply Strunk and White’s writing style to my application responses. Highlight traction, team composition, and progress.”
SAM: [Laughs] Oh no! They’re all gonna be the same!
But if they’ve done the work and they’ve seen this article—look, if you’re not using AI to build your company, somebody else is, and they’re going to outmaneuver you. If you’re not using AI to help with your application, somebody else’s application is going to be better.
MARCUS: It’s about brevity. The application consists of the application and a deck. If you cannot tell your story in 12 to 15 slides max, then your deck is not ready. Brevity is clarity.
FAREED: How about six?
TROY: Yes.
SAM: And large font on slides.
RYAN: Josh once said “I don’t think you’re gonna get me to click through more than seven.”
MARCUS: Okay then, say seven to ten slides. Brevity is clarity. If you’re taking five slides to walk us through the problem, that can get done in one. Where else can that economy be applied?
FAREED: I’ll give some high-level communication advice. I’m a deep believer in the Minto Pyramid, a communication style from consulting. The primary thing in your introduction needs to be SCQA: Situation, Complication, Question, Answer. What’s the situation? What’s the overview? What’s the complication? What problem does that create? What’s the question that evokes—usually “how are we going to solve the complication?” And then, what’s your answer? People either jump straight to the answer, or they do this narrative style where “this happened and then that happened” and they reveal the solution at the end. You have to do the bottom line up front. Tell me what’s important in the first three sentences, because if that’s not good, we’re out. We’re reviewing a lot of applications. If you don’t start with the most important stuff in a quick, concise, SCQA-type manner, you’re not gonna get to the meat. Don’t hide it.
JOSH: Maybe one other small point: the application consists of the text you put in there, the deck, and also your social media accounts. Do a pass on your LinkedIn to make sure it’s up to date, or that there’s actually information about what you were responsible for—that’s a very easy thing to do that everyone can control.
KENAN: Yeah, in general even just online presence helps a lot. If you click into someone’s LinkedIn and they have good writing or good thoughts… Twitter same thing—it’s always a very good signal.
MARCUS: I think the other thing is: you should really have a LinkedIn profile. Sometimes we get these applications without them and it’s tough. Ask yourself, do you really expect us to read through your posts to learn about applicable work or school experience? Remember, you’re competing against the best and brightest entrepreneurs in the world.
TROY: I’d also say—don’t omit the fact that you have a personal YouTube channel with 10,000 subscribers. That’s important information. While we may not read all your tweets, if you’re building in the open or have interesting insights and thoughts, we’d like to see that.
FAREED: Yeah, I think in general, something we haven’t talked about is signals of exceptionality. And that’s not just “you went to fancy schools.” Founders are outliers, and what we want is evidence that you’ve done outlier things. That can be from any part of your life—YouTube channels, a weird project you built, stuff that shows you’re not just following the track the world has set out for you. For some people, that default path is “go to Stanford.” So even if you’re in these elite institutions, we want to see that you’ve done something off the beaten path or exceptional in that realm.
RYAN: Alright, I think we covered it. Thanks for your time, guys.
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So awesome to read. 5 slides with huge font?! Would never have guessed but totally makes sense. Curious, thoughts on co-founders who are family members or spouses?
Great conversation on validation and being an outlier! If founders foresee a problem that customers may have before they have them, what is the best way to get validation on our solution.