Chapter 4 · Evaluating Deals

First Founder Meetings

A first founder meeting is thirty minutes to decide whether there's a deal here. What you ask, what you listen for, what red flags feel like in real time, how you leave the room with a cleaner read than you walked in with. We'll get into the question patterns top investors use, the mistakes junior VCs reliably make (leading the witness, pitching the founder), and how to take notes that'll actually be useful when you sit down to write this up.