What our Ventures team looks for in a business founder

It’s never been a better time to be a founder in the UK, and it’s something that increasing numbers of people want to do. Enterprise Nation’s 2026 StartUp Ambition research found 41% of UK adults were thinking about starting a business, with 62% of people aged 25 to 30 planning to start a business this year.¹

Most of these businesses will not succeed, and far fewer will ever get to the point where they are looking for venture capital (VC) funding for their growth. But what’s most interesting about this year’s statistics compared to previous surveys is that more respondents cited economic reasons, rather than ‘passion’, behind their ambitions. People are recognising the best way to respond to economic uncertainty is to take matters into their own hands. We call it ‘dissatisfaction’, and it’s one of the key character traits we look for in the founders we choose to work with.

Relentless curiosity

Albert Einstein is credited as saying: “The important thing is not to stop questioning.” He was offering advice on life, but could just as easily have been talking about entrepreneurship. The founders who change things are often the ones who couldn’t stop asking ‘why?’. You have to be that restless, dissatisfied, driven person who interrogates everything around them.

That doesn’t mean being difficult on a personal level. Many of the best founders we meet are charming. But beneath the surface is a relentless first-principles thinking that refuses to accept the world at face value. It’s that constant questioning that creates the commercial opportunity: the problem worth solving, and the market waiting to be found. So, one of the first things we look for in founders is a degree of intolerance. It’s a specific personal characteristic, and when it’s combined with genuine domain expertise, it becomes one of the most reliable signals we’ve found.

The square pegs

Second, founders often don’t quite fit in within more traditional organisations. For much of their lives, people have tried to get them to conform, in the classroom, at university, and throughout their careers. The pressure to pull in the same direction is relentless and, for most people, it works. What can take time for these ‘square pegs’ to recognise is that this unconventionality is, in fact, their greatest strength.

The start-up world is, by its nature, unstructured, and the people who thrive in it are often those who create order from that disorder. They see what others miss, and build what others wouldn’t attempt. If you were to ask for a character reference about them, you’d probably hear something like: “Very intelligent person, but a difficult individual.” In a corporate context, that’s a negative, but in the start-up world, it’s more likely to be a recommendation.

Overarching ambition

Nik Storonsky (Revolut’s founder) once said that what motivated him in the early days was for Revolut to be “bigger than JP Morgan”. Those kinds of ambitious statements always sound fanciful and impossible… until they aren’t. Now, Revolut has secured a British banking licence and looks ready to take on those legacy institutions. Most of the best founders have that outsized motivation to perform, and it’s something we look for and actively encourage.

The most effective founders are, by nature, driven. When your livelihood depends on the success of your business, you don’t switch off. You obsess over the problem every hour of every day, weekends included, because the stakes are entirely personal. No VC investor, however committed, can replicate that level of involvement. Even the most dedicated VC operates across a portfolio, which creates an inherent degree of separation. That’s simply the reality.

Which is why the most valuable thing VC investors can offer a great founder is not guidance on how to run the business, but good old-fashioned capital. Funding that can be deployed in a way that gives the founder room to stress-test their assumptions, recalibrate when needed, and occasionally come up for air. Beyond that, the best VC support tends to be commercial: opening doors, making introductions, and accelerating the relationships that drive revenue.

A single-minded approach to success

Strong founders are intensely focused on execution, and that is a virtue. But it can also narrow the field of vision. What a good VC investor can offer is something like a baseline reset. It’s the ability to pull a founder out of the day-to-day and encourage them to look at the business from altitude. To take a helicopter view and have a clear-headed conversation about where the business is heading, and whether the longer-term objectives still make commercial sense.

Where our involvement as investors becomes more substantive is at the point of exit. The mechanics of selling a business, whether structured as cash or shares, navigating escrow arrangements, earn-outs and their conditions, milestone-linked payments, or the nature of equity in an acquiring entity, are areas where we can add genuine value, precisely because we see these structures regularly. But even then, the founder remains in the driving seat. After a decade of building something from nothing, no one is more motivated, more informed, or more focused on getting the outcome right. Investors support and facilitate the exit process, but the best founders always want to own it.

Do you have what it takes to build a VC-backed business?

If you want to become an early-stage founder, there’s really no reason not to go for it. You can incorporate a company in the UK for £100 on Companies House. The infrastructure is there, the tools are increasingly there, and the result is a genuinely rich ecosystem of businesses being built across the country, many of which will never seek, or need, venture capital. But if you take VC money, you will almost certainly work harder than you ever have before. Not because anyone is forcing you to, but because you want to. It’s not for everyone. There is no coasting, and there is no nine-to-five. The outcome, for better or worse, becomes part of who you are.

Knowing all of that going in, and choosing to do it anyway, is itself a signal that you might be exactly the kind of person who should be running their own start-up.

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¹ https://www.enterprisenation.com/learn-something/new-wave-entrepreneurs-startup-ambition-report