When I ask founders to pitch me as if they’re pitching an investor, ninety percent of them open the exact same way. My company does this, here’s the market, and somewhere around slide three, maybe the last slide, they finally get to the team. I’ve seen it so many times that I’ve started telling founders upfront, just don’t even get to the company, just start with you.
Jeff Becker said the same thing, and he’s heard thousands of these pitches. Jeff is General Partner at Antler, where he leads the New York office, and he comes in earlier than almost anyone else, before the pitch deck, before traction, sometimes before there’s even a co-founder.
He’s made over 200 investments, closed a $225 million US fund last year, and before all of that he built a company called Ear Hooks to 250,000 customers while working full time at LinkedIn and writing checks as small as $1,000 on AngelList to teach himself how to invest. He didn’t wait for anyone to give him the license to do this, and in his own words he just went and took it.
His brand is backing maniacs at inception, but what he means by maniacs is specific. People with a deep relationship to the problem, who are front-loading their time, working insanely hard, with a real feel for the nuance required to build the thing they’re going after, and that quality is infectious. You get indoctrinated by it just being in the room with them.
The question is how you find it, and this is where most founders are getting it wrong.
Here’s what I took away.
The psych test comes before everything else
Jeff evaluates founders through three levels in a fixed order, and the company doesn’t come up until the end.
The first level is psychology. Before he hears anything about what someone is building, he wants to know who they are, what were they like growing up, how would their friends or family describe them, what are the hardest things they’ve done in their lives, are they built for this. He called it a psych test, and if someone can’t get through that, nothing else matters.
The second level is obsession, which he described as more of an interrogation. Tell me what you’re building, why you’re building it, tell me about that thing, and he goes sequentially deeper to see how far down that line of questioning he can take you before you run out of conviction or nuance.
The third is execution. When did you start, what have you done, how fast are you moving.
Psychology, obsession, execution, in that order. His summary of it was the clearest thing I’ve heard on this in over 100 episodes of this show, “convince me of you before we get into anything.” And when I pushed back that this might only matter at the earliest stages, he didn’t budge. It doesn’t matter if you’re flying the plane at seed or Series D, you still want to know we’re not going to crash.
Resilience isn’t a word. It’s evidence.
The reason Jeff goes to childhood and upbringing before anything else is that every great CEO he’s ever spoken to talks about resilience, and he wants to find out if a founder actually has it before they tell him they do. He asks the same one or two questions across thousands of meetings so he can build real pattern recognition for who sounds and acts different from everyone else.
What he’s looking for is what he called legible proof of resilience, and it shows up in different ways for different people, a top gamer, an ultramarathon runner, a baseball player, someone who did something exceptional that has nothing to do with startups. The domain doesn’t matter. What he’s trying to tease out is why you didn’t give up, what was driving you, what that story reveals about how your mind works when things get hard.
He used himself as an example. Growing up the little brother, super competitive, failure not an option, and that identity showed up the same way whether he was a baseball player, a salesperson sneaking into freight elevators at Xerox to find new accounts, or running Ear Hooks from five to eleven every night after a full day at LinkedIn. The pattern was legible long before venture capital entered the picture, and that’s what he’s looking for in founders, not a resume, a pattern.
The founders being overlooked are the real opportunity
There’s a group of founders getting funded fast right now, ex-founders, people spinning out of Anthropic or OpenAI, people in the hottest categories with the most obvious stories, going straight to a seed round sometimes before they have much to show, and there’s a feeding frenzy around them.
Jeff is not chasing those people.
He’s looking for the group he described as completely overlooked, the ones who are working insanely hard, built for more, and have done something equally impressive in an unrelated domain, people whose story isn’t immediately legible on a LinkedIn profile. Four years ago during crypto winter, he did two deals that no one else would touch, tier one firms eventually led the seed rounds, and both are now potentially fund-returning companies for Antler. He got there by staying focused on the person, not the consensus narrative around the market, and the rounds getting the most attention right now are not always going to the best builders.
Your investors work for you. Most founders never use them.
Once Jeff makes an investment, he runs the same onboarding every time and tells every founder the same thing, now that I’m an investor, I work for you, text me, call me any hour of the night, whatever you need, and if I’m not working as hard as you, I don’t deserve to be on the cap table.
He talked about leaving LinkedIn where the day was coffee at nine, free lunch, gym in the basement, six hours of actual work, and said that in venture he’s doing fifteen to eighteen hour days and texting founders at two in the morning because if he’s not building his own firm with the same intensity he’s asking founders to build their companies, he doesn’t have the right to ask for seven or ten percent of someone’s company and then sit back and give advice.
But the part most founders miss is that the relationship has to be earned on both sides, and he’ll spend political capital freely for founders who are putting up real numbers, but for founders who aren’t doing that work he won’t.
I’ve talked to a lot of founders who don’t leverage their investors at all, and the fear underneath it is real, if I ask for an intro and it doesn’t convert does that make me look bad, if I tell them I’m thinking about replacing my CRO will they lose confidence in me, and that fear is expensive because the founders who get the most from their investors are the ones who show up with specific asks, make it easy to say yes, and give their investors something worth advocating for.
The takeaway
Everything Jeff talked about comes back to the same thing. Investors are not primarily betting on your company, they’re betting on you, and they’re forming that view before you say a single word about what you’re building.
The psych test comes first. The obsession interrogation comes second. Execution comes third. The company is last. And if you can’t make it through that psych test, none of the rest of it matters.
So before your next investor meeting, get your own answers ready, not your company’s answers, yours. What are the hardest things you’ve done, why didn’t you quit, what does that pattern say about how you show up when things get hard. Get that answer sharp, then get to the company.
The full episode also gets into Jeff’s fund math, why the best storytellers often get rewarded over the best operators in today’s market, and how Antler’s model of making 200 bets per fund is built to find the people everyone else is missing.
Listen to the full episode above.
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Links:
Antler: https://www.antler.co/
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Chapters
00:00 - Intro
02:00 - The Maniac Framework
09:00 - Why Childhood Matters
15:00 - Jeff’s Origin Story
20:00 - Angel Investing Days
26:00 - The Role of Luck
33:00 - AI & One-Person Companies
41:00 - Fund Math & Dilution
46:00 - Storytellers vs. Operators
51:00 - “I Work For You”
