Jessica Livingston: evaluation

Transcript context

…You talked about it, so there's this earnestness you look for, also not being defensive. There's this also spectrum of confidence and people believing in what they're doing. Do you have any thoughts on just how to find that? What does that look like when they're too defensive versus they're just confident and then they know what they're talking about? Confidence is good. You definitely want confidence. It's hard to... I think you can see it when you experience it. Like someone who's confident in answering your questions but isn't defensive, there's definitely a difference. And I don't know, this is why I'm saying it's sort of hard to articulate these things, but confidence means you can say, "I've thought about that and I don't know the answer. " That's confidence. And they'll say, "But here's what I do to try to figure it out. Here are my plans to address that." Confidence, I should have put that upfront because that's very important, especially when it comes to fundraising, you cannot go into an investor meeting lacking confidence. You can come into YC's interview lacking confidence, but we will then help you in the next three months to gain more confidence. And by the way, one of the things we do to help people gain more confidence is to make them believe that their startup is a great investment, to help them create a startup that truly is possibly going to make money or at least worth being a good bet. That's the thing, early stage, the best you can offer is like, "I might not succeed, but I'm definitely a good bet." And we help them with their product, we help them with their ideas, and we help them that, by demo day, they can get up on stage and legitimately say, "We're a good bet and here's why. Let me tell you about our idea." And so we definitely help with confidence. Awesome. A couple other things you mentioned earlier, just to unpack a little bit. So being committed, something you look for, and co-founders getting along. In terms of committed, I imagine, these are very practical things. How are they actually going to stick to this? Are they actually excited to work on this? Maybe talk about that a little bit.…

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