What Makes A VC Say Yes To A Founder

Mary Minno is a Founding Partner at Treehub.

gettyOver the past year, I’ve backed 43 startups. This fall, I’m teaching Stanford School of Medicine’s AI Lab master’s course, training medtech entrepreneurs. Between investing at Treehub and teaching at Stanford, I spend my time thinking about what makes a founder successful. At Treehub, we’ve interacted with more than 700 startups over the past year—from polished pitches to brilliant scientists who have never pitched before and founders who can sell a vision but haven’t figured out how to build it.

There’s no one playbook to raise venture capital. Every investor has a different thesis and definition of potential. But reflecting on my time on both sides of the table, four qualities stand out to me.

And they aren’t necessarily what you’d expect.

The best founders can move between the big picture and the smallest details, explain how their company will transform an industry and then walk me through a technical challenge or what they learned from a failed experiment.

Vision without execution is just an idea. Execution without vision can lead to building something that never becomes a meaningful business.

This is particularly important in healthcare and AI. Scientists, physicians and researchers often understand a problem more deeply than anyone else. But building a company requires connecting that expertise to a bigger picture. Who needs this? Why now? How will it reach them? And how big could it become?

I don’t expect founders to know everything. I look for people who can connect what they know to what they still need to learn.

The best founders have an intangible quality that makes you want to keep listening. They paint a picture of what the world can become. They communicate in a simple, poetic way that captivates listeners, often with infectious energy.

It isn’t about being the loudest person in the room or having the slickest presentation. It’s about having contagious conviction that draws people in.

Building a company means convincing employees to join, convincing customers to try an unproven product and convincing investors to back a future you can’t guarantee. That takes the ability to communicate why an idea matters.

This storytelling is a skill founders can develop. What can’t be manufactured is genuine conviction. The best founders have an unmistakable connection to the problem they’re solving. They don’t just want you to understand their idea; they need you to understand why it matters.

Every founder has a vision. What separates those who build companies from those who don’t is how they respond when that vision collides with reality.

When a customer says no, a technical breakthrough takes longer than expected or a business model fails in practice, I want to know whether a founder can get creative, find another path and adapt without losing sight of the underlying problem.

Grit isn’t stubbornly pursuing the same strategy regardless of the evidence. It’s refusing to abandon an important problem just because the first solution didn’t work.

In my work, I often meet founders before they’ve created a pitch deck. Without revenue or customer traction to evaluate, I look at what they’ve already done with limited resources. Have they investigated the problem, challenged their assumptions and found ways to make progress?

Those actions reveal how they might navigate uncertainty when the stakes get higher. Resourcefulness before a company exists can be just as telling as traction after launch.

Building a company takes extraordinary time, attention and emotional energy. I don’t mean founders should sacrifice their health or relationships. Burnout isn’t a business strategy.

But there’s a difference between liking an idea and feeling compelled to solve a problem. Investors want to see the commitment to push through difficult stretches after the excitement of starting something new wears off.

This is especially relevant for scientists and clinicians. Turning years of research or firsthand experience into a business requires taking on challenges beyond your original expertise. Why this problem? Why are you the person to solve it? What have you seen that others haven’t? And why spend the next several years figuring it out?

A genuine connection between the founder and the problem can keep them moving when progress is slow and the path forward is unclear.

One of the biggest mistakes investors can make is confusing a founder’s ability to pitch with their ability to build.

Traditional venture capital relies on signals like revenue, growth and customer adoption. Those metrics matter, but they can cause investors to overlook people earlier in their journey. Waiting for them can mean overlooking exceptional founders before they’ve had the opportunity to prove themselves.

Some of the most consequential healthcare companies may come from researchers developing scientific breakthroughs, physicians who’ve witnessed persistent failures in patient care or technical founders who recognize opportunities others haven’t yet. They may not have a perfect pitch or an established network. That doesn’t mean they lack potential.

Of course, charisma, grit, vision and commitment don’t guarantee success. A founder still needs a real market, a viable business model and a solution that works.

But when I think about what makes me say yes, I return to four questions: Can this person connect the details to the vision? Can they bring others along? Can they navigate obstacles? And are they deeply committed to solving the problem?

Sometimes, the founder worth betting on isn’t the one who already knows how to build a company. It’s the one who has found a problem worth solving and can learn everything else along the way. As investors, our job is to recognize that potential before everyone else does.​​​

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