Why Investors Keep Getting Founder Evaluation Wrong | A Case for Human-Centric Venture Capital

The playbook is everywhere: build your data room, nail your market sizing questions and answers, optimize your KPIs, hit the metrics. It’s clean, measurable, and feels scientific. Yet investors who’ve been in this game for a decade know a secret that spreadsheets can never capture: the best returns don’t come from finding the right technology stack or spotting the next viral token before others do. They come from recognizing and backing founders who can fundamentally reshape how they think, operate, and adapt.

The Commoditization of Everything Measurable

Here’s what’s happened to modern venture capital: the toolkits have become standardized. Market sizing methodology? You can find templates everywhere. Competitive landscape analysis? A junior analyst with ChatGPT access can do it in an afternoon. Due diligence checklists, market trend reports, protocol benchmarks — these are now table stakes, not differentiators.

The real question isn’t whether you’ve analyzed the market sizing correctly or built the most sophisticated financial models. It’s whether you’ve understood the human being sitting across from you — and whether they have the capacity to outpace whatever challenges their company will inevitably face.

This is where most venture capital playbooks miss the mark. They treat technology as the variable that matters. But technology is static — it’s a frozen moment in time. The code you write today will need rewriting tomorrow. The protocol you launch will need reimagining in six months. What actually moves a company through chaos is the founder’s ability to evolve, to unlearn old assumptions, and to reinvent their approach when reality demands it.

The Human Layer Remains Scarce

When you walk into a room full of crypto founders or AI entrepreneurs, many will dazzle you with their technical capabilities, their tokenomics models, or their AI benchmark results. These things matter, sure. But they’re not the bottleneck. The bottleneck has always been human transformation — the founder’s resilience, emotional depth, strategic flexibility, and the courage to rebuild what they’ve just constructed.

The investors who’ve built legendary track records aren’t the ones who memorized the latest benchmark scores or followed cryptocurrency trend cycles most precisely. They’re the ones who learned to read character signals that don’t appear in any data room. They spotted something about how a founder carries themselves, how they respond to criticism, how they think about problems that others missed.

This was exactly my reasoning when I decided to back Roman Cyganov and Antix.in, the team building hyper-realistic AI digital humans for web3 environments. Roman didn’t win the pitch competition through polished slides or impressive metrics. What caught my attention was something else entirely — the way he engaged at a founder gathering, the absence of ego, the genuine openness to input, the ability to absorb feedback without getting defensive.

In that single interaction, I learned more about his future trajectory than market sizing questions and answers could have revealed. His technical team could build the product. But his character would determine whether they could navigate the unpredictable path of bringing something genuinely new to the world.

Resilience Isn’t About Grinding Harder

The mythology around founders paints them as machines — sleep-deprivation badges, endless sprints, relentless optimization. But the founders who actually win aren’t the ones who simply out-work everyone. They’re the ones who expand their emotional and intellectual range.

The most resilient founders can be uncompromising about their vision while remaining flexible about how they achieve it. They can take a hit from the market, digest what went wrong, and pivot with conviction — without losing the thread of their larger mission. They can hold people to a high standard while also giving them room to grow and experiment.

This capacity for paradox — for holding opposing qualities simultaneously — is what separates founders who build durable companies from those who burn out or plateau. It comes from experience, yes, but more importantly from willingness to examine themselves honestly and to evolve their thinking.

What Venture Capital Actually Is

Strip away the romanticized disruption narrative and venture capital at its core is about one thing: helping founders grow faster than their problems multiply. That’s not a budget line item. That’s mentorship. That’s relationship. That’s the willingness to ask the hard questions that help a founder see what they couldn’t previously see.

The real work of a venture capitalist isn’t providing answers — it’s helping founders find their own answers by confronting reality directly, by moving through discomfort, and by building the capacity to handle what comes next. This often requires breaking established patterns, questioning received wisdom, and having the courage to operate outside conventional bounds.

That’s the unconventional side of venture capital — the part that says if the current rules don’t serve your vision, break them and create new ones. If your existing business model is limiting your potential, burn it down and rebuild. If the market isn’t responding, don’t optimize — reimagine.

The Final Leverage Point

In web3 and artificial intelligence, technology evolves with dizzying speed. Models become obsolete in weeks. Protocols get disrupted in months. But the founders who lead category-defining companies aren’t the ones chasing the latest technological trend. They’re the ones who transform faster than the technology landscape itself.

Technology is the medium through which founders express their vision. People are the source. The exits, the pivots, the breakthrough products, the market discoveries — all of these flow from the founder’s capacity to think differently and act boldly.

So if you’re looking for real leverage in early-stage investing, stop searching for it in the codebase or the business model. It lives in the humans who can evolve, adapt, lead, and reshape reality. Everything else is secondary.