what do seed investors look for in founders? convince us that you're convinced

last week i taped with the co-founder of a seed fund in montreal. they lead or co-lead seed rounds in enterprise ai, robotics, supply chain and advanced manufacturing.

he gave me a number that should bother every canadian founder. by his count, two thirds of canadian seed and series a rounds are led by foreign investors. that's part of why they built the fund. the country needs more local money willing to go first.

then i asked the question every founder wants answered. what do seed investors look for in founders?

i expected a framework. market size, team, traction, the usual.

instead he said this.

"the founder has to convince us that they're convinced, you know, that's it."

and he admitted something investors don't usually say out loud. a lot of the time he walks into the meeting knowing very little about the startup's technology. he's not the expert. you are. so what he's reading isn't the tech. it's you.

now, conviction gets misunderstood. founders hear it and think volume. louder pitch, bigger claims, more adjectives.

that's not it.

conviction is what's still standing after the hard questions. it's the founder who's thought about the objection before you raise it. who knows the weak spot in the plan and can tell you why it doesn't kill the business. who has talked to enough customers that their answers come from memory, not from the deck.

you can't fake that for an hour with someone who sees hundreds of pitches. it leaks out.

the bar he described at seed is concrete. below a million in annual recurring revenue, with some commercial traction. the tech risk is mostly gone. the go to market risk is still there. so he's betting on whether you can sell what you've built.

and with a thin p&l, that bet comes down to storytelling. can you make someone see where this is going when the numbers don't show it yet?

he cares more about founder market fit than about whether you've done it before. a repeat founder in the wrong market loses to a first timer who has lived the problem.

i liked how he described the job of the fund. "we want to be a sparring partner when things are going well and a shock absorber" when they're not.

that's a good test for any investor you take money from. will they push you when you're winning and protect you when you're losing? or do they only show up for one of those?

he had a couple of contrarian takes too. when public markets punished software companies on the fear that ai would let everyone build their own tools, he thought they overreacted. "no one's going to vibe code their own slack." and he thinks personal robotics hardware is further out than most vcs believe.

that's conviction in action, by the way. he doesn't hedge. he tells you what he thinks and why.

here's a way to test yourself before the meeting. write down the three questions you least want to be asked. the ones that make your stomach drop. then answer each one out loud, to a friend, without notes. if you can't do it calmly, you're not convinced yet. you're hoping. and hope reads very different from conviction across a table.

long term this is what fundraising keeps coming back to. ai can write your deck, build your model and polish your one-liner. it can't convince you. and an investor can tell the difference between a founder who believes and a founder who's performing belief.

before your next pitch, run yourself through the founder's fundraising checklist. the gaps it shows you are the questions you'll get asked.

so if an investor pushed on the weakest part of your plan tomorrow... would your answer convince you?