Cristian Munteanu
Cristian Munteanu
Aug 8, 2025
The missing founder
One of the biggest mistakes investors make is believing that teams can be completed after the investment.
I don’t know of any case where an incomplete team of founders successfully recruited a co-founder after raising money. Not one. I’m not saying it’s hard. I’m saying it doesn’t happen.
The reason is simple: great founders don’t want to join companies that have already raised money but are missing critical people. By that point, the opportunity cost is too high. The best founders are already working on their own companies or have a dozen offers from companies that don’t feel like rescue missions. Joining a partially formed startup after funding feels like being hired to fix someone else’s problem. Great founders want to build, not patch.
Worse, the founders who do get recruited at that stage tend to be the wrong ones. They’re often people who aren’t good enough to start something on their own, but are happy to jump aboard a funded company. They may have the resume, but they lack founder-level initiative. These are not the people you want responsible for your startup’s survival.
So when I hear a founding team say, “We plan to find our technical co-founder after we raise,” or “We’ll bring in a business lead after we get funded,” it’s a giant red flag. The translation is: “We couldn’t convince anyone good enough to join us before there was money.” And if they couldn’t then, why would that change after funding? Money buys employees, not co-founders.
As VCs, we have to internalize this. You invest in the team you see today, not the imaginary one that might exist tomorrow. If the team is incomplete now, it will almost certainly stay incomplete. And an incomplete team almost always means a weaker company.
In fact, worse than incomplete is poorly completed. The danger isn’t just that they won’t find someone; it’s that they’ll feel pressure to fill the gap and make a bad hire. A bad co-founder is worse than no co-founder. They create misalignment, erode trust, and slow decision-making precisely when speed matters most.
Founding teams aren’t assembly kits. The right co-founding team usually assembles itself organically before there’s funding, through shared history, trust, and complementary skills. Once the race has started, you can’t bolt on a new leg and expect the runner to sprint.
So when evaluating startups, we should be brutally honest with ourselves and with the founders: we invest only if we are happy with the founding team as it stands, before deploying any capital. Anything else is just wishful thinking. And startups don’t run on wishful thinking. They run on reality.
I don’t know of any case where an incomplete team of founders successfully recruited a co-founder after raising money. Not one. I’m not saying it’s hard. I’m saying it doesn’t happen.
The reason is simple: great founders don’t want to join companies that have already raised money but are missing critical people. By that point, the opportunity cost is too high. The best founders are already working on their own companies or have a dozen offers from companies that don’t feel like rescue missions. Joining a partially formed startup after funding feels like being hired to fix someone else’s problem. Great founders want to build, not patch.
Worse, the founders who do get recruited at that stage tend to be the wrong ones. They’re often people who aren’t good enough to start something on their own, but are happy to jump aboard a funded company. They may have the resume, but they lack founder-level initiative. These are not the people you want responsible for your startup’s survival.
So when I hear a founding team say, “We plan to find our technical co-founder after we raise,” or “We’ll bring in a business lead after we get funded,” it’s a giant red flag. The translation is: “We couldn’t convince anyone good enough to join us before there was money.” And if they couldn’t then, why would that change after funding? Money buys employees, not co-founders.
As VCs, we have to internalize this. You invest in the team you see today, not the imaginary one that might exist tomorrow. If the team is incomplete now, it will almost certainly stay incomplete. And an incomplete team almost always means a weaker company.
In fact, worse than incomplete is poorly completed. The danger isn’t just that they won’t find someone; it’s that they’ll feel pressure to fill the gap and make a bad hire. A bad co-founder is worse than no co-founder. They create misalignment, erode trust, and slow decision-making precisely when speed matters most.
Founding teams aren’t assembly kits. The right co-founding team usually assembles itself organically before there’s funding, through shared history, trust, and complementary skills. Once the race has started, you can’t bolt on a new leg and expect the runner to sprint.
So when evaluating startups, we should be brutally honest with ourselves and with the founders: we invest only if we are happy with the founding team as it stands, before deploying any capital. Anything else is just wishful thinking. And startups don’t run on wishful thinking. They run on reality.
I don’t know of any case where an incomplete team of founders successfully recruited a co-founder after raising money. Not one. I’m not saying it’s hard. I’m saying it doesn’t happen.
The reason is simple: great founders don’t want to join companies that have already raised money but are missing critical people. By that point, the opportunity cost is too high. The best founders are already working on their own companies or have a dozen offers from companies that don’t feel like rescue missions. Joining a partially formed startup after funding feels like being hired to fix someone else’s problem. Great founders want to build, not patch.
Worse, the founders who do get recruited at that stage tend to be the wrong ones. They’re often people who aren’t good enough to start something on their own, but are happy to jump aboard a funded company. They may have the resume, but they lack founder-level initiative. These are not the people you want responsible for your startup’s survival.
So when I hear a founding team say, “We plan to find our technical co-founder after we raise,” or “We’ll bring in a business lead after we get funded,” it’s a giant red flag. The translation is: “We couldn’t convince anyone good enough to join us before there was money.” And if they couldn’t then, why would that change after funding? Money buys employees, not co-founders.
As VCs, we have to internalize this. You invest in the team you see today, not the imaginary one that might exist tomorrow. If the team is incomplete now, it will almost certainly stay incomplete. And an incomplete team almost always means a weaker company.
In fact, worse than incomplete is poorly completed. The danger isn’t just that they won’t find someone; it’s that they’ll feel pressure to fill the gap and make a bad hire. A bad co-founder is worse than no co-founder. They create misalignment, erode trust, and slow decision-making precisely when speed matters most.
Founding teams aren’t assembly kits. The right co-founding team usually assembles itself organically before there’s funding, through shared history, trust, and complementary skills. Once the race has started, you can’t bolt on a new leg and expect the runner to sprint.
So when evaluating startups, we should be brutally honest with ourselves and with the founders: we invest only if we are happy with the founding team as it stands, before deploying any capital. Anything else is just wishful thinking. And startups don’t run on wishful thinking. They run on reality.
I don’t know of any case where an incomplete team of founders successfully recruited a co-founder after raising money. Not one. I’m not saying it’s hard. I’m saying it doesn’t happen.
The reason is simple: great founders don’t want to join companies that have already raised money but are missing critical people. By that point, the opportunity cost is too high. The best founders are already working on their own companies or have a dozen offers from companies that don’t feel like rescue missions. Joining a partially formed startup after funding feels like being hired to fix someone else’s problem. Great founders want to build, not patch.
Worse, the founders who do get recruited at that stage tend to be the wrong ones. They’re often people who aren’t good enough to start something on their own, but are happy to jump aboard a funded company. They may have the resume, but they lack founder-level initiative. These are not the people you want responsible for your startup’s survival.
So when I hear a founding team say, “We plan to find our technical co-founder after we raise,” or “We’ll bring in a business lead after we get funded,” it’s a giant red flag. The translation is: “We couldn’t convince anyone good enough to join us before there was money.” And if they couldn’t then, why would that change after funding? Money buys employees, not co-founders.
As VCs, we have to internalize this. You invest in the team you see today, not the imaginary one that might exist tomorrow. If the team is incomplete now, it will almost certainly stay incomplete. And an incomplete team almost always means a weaker company.
In fact, worse than incomplete is poorly completed. The danger isn’t just that they won’t find someone; it’s that they’ll feel pressure to fill the gap and make a bad hire. A bad co-founder is worse than no co-founder. They create misalignment, erode trust, and slow decision-making precisely when speed matters most.
Founding teams aren’t assembly kits. The right co-founding team usually assembles itself organically before there’s funding, through shared history, trust, and complementary skills. Once the race has started, you can’t bolt on a new leg and expect the runner to sprint.
So when evaluating startups, we should be brutally honest with ourselves and with the founders: we invest only if we are happy with the founding team as it stands, before deploying any capital. Anything else is just wishful thinking. And startups don’t run on wishful thinking. They run on reality.
