The Mirror

At a dinner a few weeks ago, someone asked me what I do. I told them I invest in people. Not in companies, not in ideas, in people, before there is a company to speak of. They leaned in with the question I always get, some version of: “So you can just look at someone and know?”

The honest answer is no. The more honest answer is that the question has the whole thing backwards.

Betting on a person, not an idea

Here is what the job actually is. Before there is a product, before there is revenue, before there is even an idea worth arguing about, I have to decide whether to bet on a person. Not on their plan, because the plan will change within weeks. Not on their idea, because ideas are the cheapest thing in this entire industry. I have watched people walk in certain about what they were going to build and walk out three weeks later building something unrecognisable, and be right to. The idea was never the asset. The person was.

Which sounds clean until you try to do it. Because you can’t see a person directly. You can’t put drive on a scale. There is no unit for agency. “Potential” doesn’t sit on the surface where you can read it off like a price. So the whole craft comes down to one question: if I can’t measure the thing I’m betting on, what am I actually looking at?

Slope, not position

For a long time, I have told myself that the answer is slope. Not where someone is, but how fast they’ve climbed, and from where. Position is mostly inherited. A clean resume often just means someone was handed a good starting line, and a good starting line tells you almost nothing about what a person does when it’s taken away and it’s only them against an empty page. Slope is the part that survives that. So I learned to look past the polish for the distance someone had actually travelled, and to judge them against where they began, not where they happened to land.

I still believe that. But there’s something about my own reads I didn’t want to admit.

I thought I was reading them

The people I believed in fastest, the ones where conviction arrived before I could explain it, were almost always living some version of a life I’d already lived. When I meet someone quietly restless inside a comfortable, well-paid job, I feel it, because I sat in that chair once and felt exactly that restlessness. When someone tells me about the thing they built with their friends on a deadline, no money, no permission, just the need to make it exist, I feel the fire, because at one point it was mine too. And when I meet the person who can’t stop making things even when nobody asked them to, I recognise the itch, because I couldn’t stop either.

I used to think I was reading them. I was remembering me.

And the longer I sit with it, the more layers it has. The people I’m judging are ambitious, and ambitious people are almost by definition brilliant at telling the story of themselves in the best possible light. They walk in as the most convincing version of who they are. So what I’m really doing, in that first meeting, is holding a story someone has carefully shaped about themselves up against a story I quietly carry about myself. Two highlight reels, meeting in a room, and I call the resonance between them conviction.

The realisation: I’m biased

I might be wrong about all of it. I’m six months into this, not sixteen years, and I hold these ideas the way you hold anything this early, firmly enough to act on, loosely enough to drop. Maybe it gets easier with reps. Maybe the mirror fogs less the more people you meet. I hope so.

But one thing has stopped feeling like a theory and started feeling like a plain realisation: I’m biased. Not in the loud way the word usually gets thrown around, but in the quiet, structural way, where my own life keeps deciding things for me before I’ve consciously decided anything at all. I don’t want it to. Wanting doesn’t seem to have much to do with it. And the more I caught it in myself, the more I saw it in everyone around me. This isn’t a talent-investor problem, it’s a people problem. Every talent investor, every CEO, every person who has ever hired someone, or built a relationship with anyone, and then decided they were obviously going to be great, is running the same quiet machine: holding a stranger up against their own memory and calling the match insight.

I’ve come to think saying this out loud is the most useful thing I can do about it. A bias you deny gets to run you. A bias you can name, you can at least argue with. So I’d rather own the weakness than keep trusting the instinct.

Because a mirror has one merciless property. It only ever shows you yourself. If the yardstick is my own life, then I’ll be most blind to exactly the people I should be most excited about, the ones whose greatness looks nothing like mine. Left unchecked, I’d slowly assemble a portfolio of slightly younger versions of myself and call it an eye for talent.

This isn’t Venture Capital

And yet the strange gift of this job is that you don’t get to judge from a safe distance and move on. This isn’t venture capital, where you write a cheque and read the update email. It’s closer to joining someone’s team for the hardest months of their life. You’re there for the highs that aren’t yours to claim and the lows you can’t fix. A cofounder leaves. A contract that felt certain goes quiet. A pitch that has to land in ten seconds gets rewritten at midnight. You feel all of it, the nerves and the elation, without owning a single share of the company. These last few weeks have been the most intense of my time doing this, several of my teams moving toward the moment a panel decides whether to back them, and I’ve felt every setback and every small win as if it were mine.

And something happens in that closeness that no framework prepared me for. Conviction often turns up out of nowhere. Not from a slide or a number, but from a small moment, helping a founder finally see something they’d been circling for weeks, or untangling a problem with them late one evening, and suddenly you’d run through a wall for this person. I’m rarely the one who says the sentence that changes the company. Most days someone sharper than me gives them the insight that unlocks the quarter, and it isn’t mine. I’ve made my peace with that. What I offer isn’t the answer, it’s continuity. I was there last week and I’ll be there next week, and somewhere in all the chaos there’s one person whose whole job is to be in their corner and to see them clearly. I didn’t expect how much that would come to mean, to them and to me.

Learning to distrust my own eye

Which is exactly why the discipline matters. When you’re this invested in people, the bias stops feeling like bias. It feels like loyalty, like taste, like love. So I try to do a few unglamorous things. I bet, on purpose, on slopes I’ve never walked, and I treat the lower confidence I feel as a fact about me and not about them. I meet far more people than seems reasonable, because volume is the only thing that slowly wears down the tyranny of my own reflection. And I write down what I believed about someone before the outcome is in, so I can’t quietly rewrite my own memory later to make myself look better.

What keeps me up at night

Which brings me to the thing that actually keeps me up at night.

It isn’t the founders I’m backing. They have me, and each other, and a hundred people trying to help. It’s the ones I never met. The person exactly as hungry, carrying exactly as much slope, who I walked straight past because nothing about them rhymed with anyone I’d ever been. They’re out there right now, more of them than I’ll meet in a lifetime of trying, and most of them will never be found. Not because the signal is missing. Because it doesn’t resemble the observer.

I can’t fix that. But it’s the only ambition in this job I truly care about: to get a little better, every year, at finding the people outside my own reflection. To catch myself in the half second where conviction lands too easily, and ask the harder question instead.

Not “is this person talented.”

Whose potential am I structurally unable to see?

That’s the person I’m about to miss. And more often than I’d like to admit, they’re the one most worth backing.