What I look for in a founder

Business startupstechnologyTop News What I look for in a founder Demetrios Zoppos Headshots Relevant News What I look for in a founder 24 July 2026 Consensus for sanctioning Israel growing in Europe 24 July 2026 Cyprus races to complete emergency care reform by November deadline 24 July 2026 newsroom 24 July 2026 FacebookXWhatsAppEmailPrintViber Demetrios Zoppos on technology, innovation, and Cyprus’s place in the world that’s coming. When we invest at the earliest stage, there is rarely any revenue and no proven market, and the product will end up looking nothing like its first version. We are not backing a business. We are backing a person. The industry politely calls this a “founder bet,” and it is the honest description of the job. I previously argued that the entrepreneur is the one agent in the process who cannot walk away. This is the sequel to that thought. If everything turns on that single person, how do you recognise them before they have proved anything? Start with how strange the act of founding is. Most clever, capable, ambitious people never start anything; they take the job, draw the salary, keep the exit open. The founder gives all of that up voluntarily, usually for less money and far more anxiety, for a small chance at building something that did not exist. Schumpeter put this person, not the inventor or the banker, at the centre of the whole economy, because they are the scarce input. Because the person outlasts the plan, the plan is almost the wrong thing to study. Nearly every good company is a pivot or two from the idea it began with, and what stays constant through the pivots is the founder. So in a first meeting I talk with founders about their proposition, though not really to judge the proposition. The deck and the argument behind it are an instrument for reading the founder: how they hold a belief, and what happens when I push on it. The best founders have strong views about the destination but are flexible about the journey. Someone who cannot tell you why they might be wrong, or who defends every detail of the plan with equal conviction, is failing the test even when the plan is good. Over time we have distilled what we look for, a little uneasily, into three things, and none of them can come across in a polished pitch. The first is drive, and it counts for more than intelligence. Tenacity is the best predictor of execution, and the drive that counts is not a capacity for the heroic sprint. Building a company is a marathon run over years, decided by thousands of small choices and knocked about by forces no founder controls. What matters is the ability to keep going: the founder still standing when the luck finally turns beats the one who ran hardest early and folded. The best of them are the most resilient. They tend not to have a tidy alternative plan mapped out. This looks like recklessness but is closer to the opposite: good founders have priced the worst case, decided they can survive it, and are free to move fast. The second is an independent mind. The most interesting founders believe something about their market that experienced insiders think is wrong, and they can tell you why, with evidence, not as a pose. Their lives tend to be non-linear: several countries, an odd career turn, a self-taught skill, a hobby that makes no sense on a CV. This is part of why immigrants are so over-represented among strong founders. Carrying more than one lens, they have the freedom to challenge conventional wisdom. And real conviction rarely arrives fully polished, so when everything about a founder is smooth, I get nervous rather than reassured. The third signal, and the most underrated, is the team. There is no such thing as the perfect founder, and hunting for one wastes time. Founders come in every shape: introverts and extroverts, the deeply technical and the sharply commercial. They tend to have distinctive strengths and, almost always, some glaring gaps. That variance is exactly why the team matters so much. You are not assessing whether the lead founder is complete; you are assessing the combined envelope of capability across the group, and whether the gaps of one are genuinely covered by the strengths of another. It matters because the team is how startups most often die. The most common cause of death is not competition, and not running out of money. It is the founders falling out with each other. So we watch it closely: have they worked together before, under real pressure, and is it clear who decides what when they disagree? We are looking for composure rather than charisma, because team resilience under pressure, rather than stage presence, is what aids survival when things go wrong. Some founder attributes are down to temperament but some are not. Drive and independence of mind are largely about who someone is. But much of what sets good founders apart are the choices they make, and choices can be learned: answering the email within the hour, doing customer support yourself long after it is beneath you, being honest about what is not working before it is forced into the open. Character sets the ceiling. Choices decide how close you get to it. Two myths are worth puncturing. The first is that founding is a young person’s game. It makes a good story and it is mostly false: the average founder is in their mid-forties at the time of starting, and fifty-year-olds are nearly twice as likely as thirty-year-olds to build a runaway success. Deep experience in the specific industry predicts success far better than youthful energy. The romantic archetype of the coder dropping out at nineteen is mostly an exception. The second myth is that the repeat founder is always the safer bet. Experience helps, but hunger fades, and first-timers often carry a sense of purpose that repeat founders have spent. What matters is not the number of prior companies but the evidence of having built and learnt. There is one more thing I have to be honest about, and it is what makes this a craft rather than a science. Every founder is a sample of one, and you cannot run a controlled experiment on a human life. Research on founders gives us priors, not verdicts on the person across the table. So the real assessment is never a score from one meeting. It is a picture built over several encounters: how someone responds under pressure, how fast they move, how honestly they answer the question they would rather dodge, how they treat people when they think it does not count. Underneath it all sits one question no framework can answer for me. What would it actually feel like to work alongside this person for ten years, through the worst of it? That is the test. Everything else is a way of getting closer to answering it. Which brings me to where this leaves a place like Cyprus. Founders are shaped by the environment that produces them. Somewhere that treats a failed attempt as experience rather than a stain gets more attempts, and attempts compound. Somewhere that prizes order and conformity, as small and insular societies tend to, quietly suppresses the alternative thinking that founding requires. That is the uncomfortable part. A small country cannot import founders at will or manufacture them, but it can build the conditions that produce more of them, by rewarding bold and slightly chaotic attempts rather than punishing them, and refusing to stigmatise the ones that fail. It also has an opening it stumbled into rather than built. A good number of foreign founders are already here, having come a variety of reasons. They are, almost by definition, exactly the kind of multi-lens outsiders who so often make strong founders, and they arrived without anyone needing to recruit them. The mistake would be to leave them in a parallel expatriate economy, running companies that merely happen to be located on the island. The opportunity is to pull them into the same room as local founders, local capital, and local talent, so that the mixing actually happens. You cannot conjure founders on demand, but when they have already chosen to come, failing to use them is its own kind of waste. Producer economies are built one improbable individual at a time. The most valuable thing a place like ours can learn is to recognise its founders early, wherever they come from, while they are still rough and unproven and easy to overlook, and to back them before anyone else will. That is the one advantage scale can never buy. Demetrios Zoppos is a Partner at 33East. The views expressed are exclusively his own. Subscribe to our Newsletter Latest News Consensus for sanctioning Israel growing in Europe Cyprus races to complete emergency care reform by November deadline Things to do on Friday, July 24 Scorching 39C heat and gusty winds forecast across Cyprus today Four rescued after distress call at Limassol’s Molos beach (photos) Guterres should broaden UN lens on Cyprus Truck driver seriously injured in Trachoni towing accident Follow en.philenews on Google News and be the first to know all the news about Cyprus and the world.