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Key Takeaways Pitch decks open doors, but character determines who survives when everything inevitably breaks.
Founders reveal more in quiet moments than in slides, metrics or polished narratives.
I’ve sat across from hundreds of founders. Coffee shops. Board rooms. Investor dinners where the food’s cold and the questions aren’t.
Some show up with beautiful decks. Perfect fonts. Charts that feel expensive. Most of those decks say the same thing. But what actually matters never appears on a slide.
You can polish a story.
You can’t edit character.
Here are 10 things I look for in founders that never show up on a pitch deck. These are the tells. The patterns. The stuff that predicts who lasts when things stop going according to plan.
1. How they talk about people who aren’t there anymore
Pay attention. How a founder discusses everyone behind them will usually blame everyone ahead of them, too. Accountability always leaks out.
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