Founder Mental Software

Jun 30, 2025

While most VCs debug your pitch, I focus on understanding your System Prompt. This philosophy drove my investments across different roles: as a VC Associate (BigID, now a unicorn), as an angel investor (MaintainX and Poolside, both unicorns), and as a Partner leading pre-seed and seed rounds that attracted tier 1 VC follow-ons.

The industry loves frameworks: Big-Five traits, pattern-recognition grids, neat archetypes that pretend to decode a person in thirty minutes. I've used them all. What I learned is simple: the actual differentiator is relational. I invest time to understand founders deeply, so they feel seen rather than analyzed.

Here's the invitation: Step into a space where you're seen rather than dissected - where no one tries to reshape you into something else.

In a world where everyone's having the same conversations at the same dinners, where conformity looks like Menlo School → Stanford → the "right" firm, your different mental software isn't a liability. It's the only real advantage left.

The venture world has gotten incredibly efficient at pattern matching. But that efficiency has created massive blind spots. While everyone chases the same AI companies, the real opportunities are being built by people whose mental software was forged outside the consensus machine - people like:

Second-time founders not repeating the same playbook
Technical builders who haven't mastered narrative polish
Immigrant founders who don't slot neatly into YC pitch cadence
People whose modest resumes hide massive upward slopes
People building outside the current hype map - in overlooked markets, weird categories, formats that don't yet have names

Psychology describes traits; relationship surfaces truth. When founders recognize they're finally being understood, trust compresses months into hours.

That's the edge - not a reinvention of frameworks, but a commitment to meet builders who live outside the hype map and say: "Stay exactly as weird as you are."

Mental Software: The Operating System of Great Founders

Just as computers run on software, humans operate on mental frameworks that determine how we process information and interact with the world. Drawing parallels with language models (LLMs), we can think of a founder's mental software as comprised of several key components:

1. Founder System Prompt (Foundational Identity)

This is a founder's "system prompt" - the conscious and unconscious core beliefs that shape how they see themselves, their company, and reality itself.

The best founders can articulate (or at least express) beliefs like:

A deeply rooted sense of purpose beyond making money
An identity built around solving important problems
A unique perspective on what should exist in the world

I listen for recurring themes in their personal stories and watch their instinctive responses to new situations. This reveals more about their potential than any pitch deck.

Take one founder whose religious father told her from childhood: "Do good on the largest possible scale." She built software to treat hundreds of patients simultaneously. Every product decision - from day one - was made with massive scale in mind. Her system prompt was hardwired for impact.

2. Reward Model (Values & Priorities)

A founder's values are their personal reward model - governing which trade-offs feel obvious, which shortcuts feel toxic, and where every marginal hour goes. Infinite money, finite integrity.

Great founders consistently:

Choose long-term thinking over short-term gains
Show extreme commitment despite uncertainty and failure
Allocate resources toward ambitious, mission-aligned goals

I watch how founders actually spend their time and how they react when values meet constraints.

One team rewrote their entire codebase in Golang on a tight deadline purely because their community requested it. Re-engineering your product mid-flight isn't rational - unless user trust is your true north. DevOps engineers loved the performance boost.

The opposite: a seed startup where each office visit revealed more expensive furniture but fewer paying customers. Their reward model prioritized appearances over substance.

3. Belief Network (Knowledge & Assumption Structure)

A founder's web of assumptions about how the world works shapes every decision - like an LLM's training data influencing its outputs.

The best founders have:

Strong convictions about the future - clear beliefs about what's coming and how they're positioning to make it reality
Contrarian thinking that challenges the status quo - ideally beliefs that are early and non-obvious
Deep domain expertise, either technical or industry-specific

I evaluate this by watching their predictions, noting their authoritative sources, and understanding their explanations for why things happen.

The key question: Are they following early signals from real builders and customers, or waiting for "truth" from Gartner and McKinsey?

One creates authority by building the future. The other follows paths someone else laid down.

4. Feedback Processing System (Learning & Adaptation Mechanism)

How founders update their mental models based on new information - like fine-tuning an LLM over time.

Exceptional founders:

Filter advice through their vision - You'll get contradictory counsel from proven experts. Without a clear vision, you can't distinguish good advice from bad.
Learn rapidly from everything - They know which assumptions need validation next and tackle unknowns in priority order, maintaining clear line of sight to the end goal.
Show exponential personal growth trajectories

I watch how they respond to contradictory information and track belief changes over time.

Example: I told an engineer-turned-CEO he needed to learn sales and introduced him to a similar founder who'd crossed $50M ARR. He went from avoiding sales entirely to closing six-figure deals. Months later: "I love selling, Oana. I have a hard time delegating because I love it so much."

The best founders don't just take feedback - they metabolize it.

5. Emotional Architecture (Feeling & Motivation System)

A founder's emotional framework drives behavior - like an LLM's output filtering system determining what actually gets expressed.

The best founders:

Run on intrinsic motivation rather than external validation
Show high resilience - your ability to survive the worst times makes your company far more likely to succeed
Balance vision optimism with execution pragmatism

Everyone rides the startup rollercoaster. But founders must endure it for years without flaking out.

I'm wary of people with flaky career patterns - the journeymen who never stick through to the end. Emotional durability isn't just nice to have; it's the difference between building something meaningful and abandoning ship when things get hard.

6. Social Interface Protocol (Relationship Operating System)

How founders navigate relationships represents their human API.

Winners consistently:

Build complementary founding teams with aligned vision and intensity
Create strong cultures that reflect their mission and belief network
Understand others' operating systems - their incentives, needs, and how you can help them succeed

Great founders have empathy - or at least map other people's motivations accurately. This shows up everywhere: customer experience design, team motivation, investor interactions.

Anti-pattern: A business co-founder joins a technical founder building open-source tools. Company success depends on the developer experience, but the CEO won't prioritize it because it's not relatable. Their reward model favors media appearances over learning their users' world.

The insight: If you're an engineer selling to engineers, you don't need a "business person." You need someone who understands your users' operating system. Treat relationship-building like an engineering problem - understand the inputs, outputs, and system requirements.

7. Attention Allocation Algorithm (Focus Management)

How founders decide what deserves attention functions like an LLM's attention mechanism - filtering the noise to focus on what actually matters.

The most successful founders:

Stay deeply involved in product while delegating everything else appropriately
Focus intensely on their mission instead of getting distracted by competitors
Ruthlessly prioritize what matters most to their vision

Founders face a constant firehose: day-to-day operations, hiring, customer calls, investor meetings, conferences, vanity projects. It's easy to lose sight of the product.

But the best founders remain the master of their product - the best person to run a demo, dive into technical details, or explain why every feature exists. They treat attention like their most valuable resource and guard it accordingly.

An Invitation, Not a Diagnosis

For anyone who funds or builds companies: the edge isn't a superior psych model. It's the willingness to spend real time so founders feel understood before they're judged.

Everything else - pattern recognition, financial engineering, network maps - works better once that trust snaps into place. For people who've never quite fit the default template, that moment of recognition is often the first real "yes" they've heard.

If you're building something that doesn't fit the hype map - something technical, weird, or simply too early for its own category - let's talk.

Motive Notes

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