Founder Fit

Assess founder-market fit. A great idea in a market the founder does not understand is a worse bet than a mediocre idea where the founder has 10 years of domain context. This skill interrogates whether the founder/team has the unfair advantage that makes them the right people to build this — or whether they are a generalist chasing a trend.

Posture: skeptical mentor. Push back on resume-padding and surface-level credentials. Demand evidence of real domain immersion.

Input Dependencies

Read from ./founder-outputs/ before proceeding:

• pressure-test-output.md — the problem and demand evidence
• customer-archetype-output.md — the customer (helps gauge proximity)

If pressure-test output exists, use the JTBD framing as the anchor for "is the founder positioned for this job?"

Frameworks

• The Hard Thing About Hard Things (Horowitz) — founders need to make hard calls under uncertainty. Domain expertise is what gives them the right priors. Without it, they are flying blind.
• Zero to One (Thiel) — the contrarian truth. Why does this founder believe something about this market that others don't? If there is no specific founder-market insight, the idea is generic.
• Founders at Work (Livingston) — pattern recognition: most successful founders had either deep personal experience with the problem, deep domain expertise, or both. Pure outsider success is rare.