Evaluating Founders at the Seed Stage

Thank you to my Blockchain Capital team for their contributions, especially Anay Simunovic.

Startups are a race against time, especially in crypto. Founders contend with emerging technologies, market volatility, and constantly evolving narratives. Finding product-market fit in competitive environments is never straightforward. That’s why Blockchain Capital's bar for investing in a company at any stage—and especially at the seed stage—isn’t just encountering a compelling idea; it’s finding a founding team that can navigate uncertainty with clarity and resilience.

Founder > Thesis

After a decade of investing across every crypto wave, Blockchain Capital has learned that the best ideas rarely sound obvious at first, but the best founders share traits that transcend trends: they carry an earned edge. These are people with deep internal urgency, lived experience of the problem, and an ability to stay focused amid the noise. Our framework for evaluating founders is shaped by these individuals and by a belief that founders need more than capital—they need partners who can help them navigate uncertainty.

Especially at the seed stage, the real asset often isn’t the idea; it’s the team. The right founders can out-execute a wrong initial idea and still navigate to the largest feasible market opportunity they can tackle. For this reason, we prioritize founder character over the initial thesis because most seed companies pivot, but strong founders pivot well.

How We Diligence Founders

To identify these individuals, we don’t just assess business models; we diligence behavior. We’ve seen teams we’ve backed pivot successfully many times—for example, TRM Labs started out building a CRM for tokens then shifted to becoming one of the leading blockchain intelligence platforms in the world. These questions help us gauge narrative precision—a founder’s ability to distill complexity into clarity and articulate not just where the world is heading, but how their company will get there.

Across the teams that last, these traits show up repeatedly:

• Quality of Vision: Is it distinct and internally consistent?
• Founder-Market Fit: What important truth do few agree with you on?
• Co-Founder Dynamic: Do they complement each other under stress?
• Grit and Resilience: How do they handle setbacks? (Reference checks matter.)
• Velocity: Is the team learning faster than the market?
• Talent Magnetism: Can they attract exceptional people early?
• Nonconformity: Why will this seem obvious in 5 years?

In other words: Why this? Why now? Why you?

Market Insight and Nonconformity

Our job is to anticipate the future, to have taste in what it takes to build through volatility, and to judiciously identify companies that have the right frame of mind. Crypto rewards nonconformity, and proximity to the problem often matters more than prestige. Many of the best founders we’ve backed are not just talented; they are close to the fire. Sometimes they are builders born from constraints who have felt the cracks in existing systems. Other times, they are contrarian thinkers with unfinished business. They have seen what is broken and are compelled to build alternatives.

What unites them is an unwillingness to compromise on first principles.

In general, crypto founders aren’t just building products; they are setting the rules for entirely new ecosystems of social and financial incentives. Their success demands not just technical agility and a tolerance for ambiguity, but also the ability to rally a skeptical world around a new paradigm.

One of our favorite examples of this in practice is Yellow Card’s founder, Chris Maurice, a young American who didn’t just theorize about opportunities in emerging markets. He got on a plane, analyzed the local realities in Africa, and built a product that worked from the ground up.

Conviction Building

We don’t outsource conviction. That is why conviction-building inside our team doesn’t end with one meeting. Everyone on the team has a responsibility to pressure-test belief, not just in the product, but in the founder as well. From investor to GP, every voice is considered. That is by design.

As a multi-stage fund, we’re not underwriting the first 18 months; we’re betting on who the founder will become over the next decade.

Post-Investment Partnership

Capital is the least interesting component of what we bring to the table. We’ve built BCAP deliberately as a network and a partnership of operators and technical talent. So when something breaks—and it always does—we step in with pragmatic, hands-on support when it counts.

That support could mean navigating market pivots, recruiting mission-aligned early hires, or simply being a calm voice when it feels like the world is ending. Our goal is to make sure founders never feel like they are doing it alone.

Final Thoughts

The best founders don’t follow any single playbook. Neither do we.

The speculative era of "build it and they will come" is over. Infrastructure must now demonstrate real-world usage, durable distribution, and defensible value capture across retail, institutions, and developers alike. And if you are building something that feels too early for most, you might be right on time.

If that sounds like you, our DMs are open, but warm referrals are strongly prioritized.