Founder Diligence: Evaluating Behaviors for Early-Stage Startups

In early-stage startups, founder behavior isn’t just one of many factors — it can be the dominant variable (and often is) in determining whether a company endures and thrives, or, plateaus and dies. I’ve worked with countless founders and categorized functional behaviors and dysfunctional behaviors for startup-company building. This post serves to illuminate them, show you a simple rubric for evaluating them, and ways to mitigate. Again, this is not to judge whether a founder is good/bad, right/wrong, ethical/unethical — this is purely to assess behaviors that enrich company value and those that do not. This list is also not exhaustive.