A quick fit check can tell Max Mullen much of what he needs to know about a founder.
The Instacart cofounder — also a prominent seed investor who has backed over 100 startups — shared his top trick for evaluating founders on the “Uncapped with Jack Altman” podcast on Thursday.
Mullen said it’s tough to tell who the “real deal” is at the seed stage, and at a certain point, he started “looking down.”
“If you’re looking at a founder and they got dirty white sneakers,” he said, “you’re a real builder.”
He’s found that the entrepreneurs who aren’t as focused on their appearance are usually the ones sleeping at the office and working on their companies around the clock.
“They don’t have time to buy nice sneakers,” Mullen said. “They just put on the same pair of sneakers, and they get dirty.”
For example, Mullen said he invested in the AI automation platform Gumloop, and one of the founders had “such dirty sneakers.”
“They were falling apart,” Mullen said, adding that he bought the founder new shoes.
“My cofounder Rahul [Behal] does not see the purpose of buying new shoes or shirts, so Max bought him a new pair,” Gumloop’s Max Brodeur-Urbas told Business Insider.
Meanwhile, a “founder who has their aesthetic fully dialed in” is usually “signaling that they’re a great founder rather than spending every ounce of their energy becoming one,” Mullen wrote in an April blog post.
“I’ve just found that the real builders, they look the part,” Mullen told Altman.
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