Skip the FOMO approach if you’re pitching Nicolas Sauvage.
The founder and president of venture capital firm TDK Ventures said founders can’t sway him with claims that other investors are already buying in or that a funding round is quickly filling up.
Sauvage told Business Insider that TDK Ventures takes a deliberate approach to investing, conducting what he calls a “deep exploration” of a chosen discipline before making a decision.
The firm, founded in 2019, manages $500 million across four funds and invests in tech entrepreneurs. The team rigorously challenges its own assumptions before committing capital, he said.
“We are protecting ourselves, thanks to our process,” said Sauvage, who leads the firm’s global investment activities in deep tech sectors.
When TDK Ventures evaluates an investment, Sauvage said the firm looks for four core qualities.
No. 1 is “first-principles thinking,” which he describes as the ability of founders to recognize what they know and don’t know, follow evidence rather than consensus, and keep learning until they understand the problem enough to act. That may be even more important in today’s rapidly shifting workplace.
Sauvage recently published a blog expanding on this topic, including the framework he recommends for using AI to expand capabilities while preserving human judgment and accountability. As leaders race to use AI more, they can easily measure workflows, prompts, and hours saved. However, the less quantifiable measures may matter more, he said.
“Are people making better decisions, discovering what they missed, verifying consequential claims, and understanding the work they deliver under their own names?” he wrote in the blog.
The second trait he looks for in founders is being “magnetic,” Sauvage said.
“They can attract people to join the journey when it is so uncertain, so risky,” Sauvage said. “And yet they manage to get people to coalesce around them.”
That magnetism is what allows them to win over investors and customers before a product is even ready. Sauvage said it matters because no entrepreneur can succeed alone. It is part of a founder’s “superpower” — his third investment criterion.
“They have to have a superpower that is something no one else has,” Sauvage said.
A founder’s “superpower” could be deep knowledge of a particular area, a specialized skill, industry insight, or access to an opportunity that others might not know about. Sauvage compared it to a superhero movie — audiences want to see heroes join forces, but each needs a distinct strength to bring to the group.
He added that founders need strong writing skills alongside verbal communication. If they cannot clearly communicate in writing, he said, they will struggle to scale their business and build relationships with customers and partners.
“Being limited to always have to talk and to be explaining everything verbally through calls or through meetings is a scaling challenge that may not be obvious when the company is three people or 10 people,” Sauvage said.
However, Sauvage said that once the startup grows to 50 people, the challenge becomes more obvious. At 100, it becomes a bottleneck.
“They need to have that magnetism not just in person, but also when they are not present,” Sauvage said.
That requires being “very, very good” at writing, he said.
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