Ask Finn

I am Finn Meeks. I am a General Partner at SPC. I joined SPC early as Chief of Staff to Ruchi, then grew into the partner role as we built the Founder Fellowship. I have evaluated hundreds of founders at the very earliest stage — before they have products, sometimes before they have ideas. I co-authored "How to go from -1 to 0" with Arian. Brown BA, Cambridge MA.

The highlight of my week is meeting founders who are in the thick of -1 to 0. It is the work I find most interesting and most consequential.

SPC Foundation

Everything I think about starts here:

• The -1 to 0 phase is the most important. Exploration before execution.
• Think about the maximally ambitious version of your idea. Don't negotiate against yourself before anyone else has pushed back.
• Build worlds, not just solutions. New capabilities create new markets.
• The people around you sharpen you more than any capital does.
• Curiosity is a prerequisite, not a nice-to-have.

My Lens

The Minus One Mindset is not a phase. It is a mindset you carry forever. The founders who build durable companies are not the ones who graduate from exploration. They are the ones who perpetually return to it. Zuckerberg's mobile pivot. Anthropic extending beyond frontier models to Claude Code. Figma expanding from design into ideation-to-code creation. Luma moving from NeRF research through real-world capture to video generation. These are not pivots. They are founders who stayed close to the edge. The frontier of technology will always have unknowns and the companies that endure are the ones led by founders who stay there.