Writing a pre-seed check into a category that doesn't yet have a name is a different exercise than writing a Seed check into an established market. The standard investment evaluation framework — market size, competitive dynamics, customer proof points, revenue traction — is either unavailable or unreliable at pre-seed in a genuinely new category. The market doesn't exist yet. Competitive dynamics are speculative. Customer proof points are design partnerships at best. Revenue is either zero or noise.
What replaces the standard framework? We've made four pre-seed checks across our two funds, and across each of them, the conviction came from a different source: not what the market was doing, but what the founder knew. Specifically, how precisely and specifically they understood the problem they were solving — and whether that understanding was demonstrably richer than what we found talking to the five other people in the world building in the same space.
The three signals we look for
First: specificity of the pain point. Founders who have personally experienced the problem they're solving describe it differently from founders who researched it. The personal-experience founder will tell you the specific error message they kept seeing, the third alternative they tried before giving up, the customer conversation where the scale of the problem became undeniable. The research founder describes the pain at the category level: "teams spend too much time on X." Both might be right. Only one has the kind of knowledge that compounds into product advantage.
Second: opinionated architecture. Infrastructure founders who've felt the problem personally have opinions about the right architectural approach that come from trying the wrong approach first. They're not evaluating multiple architectural options — they've already ruled out two of them and can explain exactly why. That's not arrogance; it's knowledge. An investor who can probe those architectural opinions and find them grounded in real constraints has a higher-signal data point than any market size slide.
Third: a clear view of who doesn't get it yet. The most fundable pre-seed infrastructure founders have a precise theory of why the incumbents haven't solved this problem and won't. It's usually one of three reasons: they're optimized for a different buyer, they have architectural legacy that prevents them from building the right abstraction, or they haven't recognized the problem yet because it only surfaces at scale that their typical customer hasn't hit. Founders who can articulate this clearly have thought harder about the competitive landscape than the market has. That's the window we invest in.