Every Founder Has Sparks Coming Out of Their Arse

Enthusiasm is the price of entry. Clarity is the thing you are actually looking for.

Every founder has sparks coming out of their arse. That is the price of entry, not the thing you are looking for.

Sit across from enough early-stage founders and you notice something. They are all on fire. The conviction, the energy, the certainty that this is the one, the way they light up describing it. It is genuinely lovely to be around, and it is also completely useless as a signal, and a lot of early backers have lost a lot of money because nobody told them that.

I have backed people this early for years, and the founders who burned brightest in the room were not the ones who went on to build the best businesses. Often it was the opposite. So it is worth being very clear about what passion is, and what it is not.

It is an easy thing to fall for, because it works on you physically. A founder lit up about their idea is persuasive in a way that has nothing to do with the idea. You leave the room feeling good. You felt something, and you quietly file the feeling as evidence.

That is the trap. You have mistaken being moved for having found a signal. The founder made you feel the way they feel, and that is a real skill, but it is a sales skill, not a building skill, and you have just let it do your thinking for you.

Energy is the most available thing in any early-stage room, and the least informative.

Think about what a signal actually has to do. To be useful, it has to discriminate. It has to be present in the good ones and absent in the bad ones, or it tells you nothing.

Passion fails that test instantly. Every founder who gets as far as pitching you is passionate. Nobody starts a business they are lukewarm about. So the fire is not a variable that separates the strong from the weak. It is a constant. It is the price of entry. Backing a founder because they are passionate is like backing a runner because they turned up in trainers.

Worse, passion can mislead in an active way. The most passionately certain founder is often the one least able to hear that the thing is not working. The fire you found so reassuring is sometimes the exact thing that will stop them seeing the truth in time.

What you are actually looking for is clarity. Whether the founder can see their own business straight.

A clear founder can tell you, without being pushed, what is not working yet. They can name the part that genuinely worries them. They can tell you what they are unsure of and what they would need to learn before they would believe their own plan. They hold their excitement and their honesty at the same time.

A founder who can only sell you the dream, who meets every hard question with a return to the vision, is a worse bet than one who can describe the problem precisely and unhappily. Selling the dream is easy and everyone can do it. Seeing the business clearly, including the ugly parts, is rare. The rare thing is the signal.

Here is the part that matters most to a backer who actually wants to help. Most early founders do not have full clarity yet. That is not a disqualification. It is just where they are.

Clarity is not a fixed trait you either find or do not. It can be coached. A sparky, half-clear founder can become a sparky, genuinely clear one, with the right questions asked often enough and honestly enough. That is real, and it is most of what good early guidance actually does.

So the backer’s job is two steps. First, tell sparks from sight, do not let the fire fool you. Second, if the person is sound, help them get clear. That second step is the work. It is what I do when I back someone, and it is the spine of 75HFB, a structured way of turning energy into clear sight rather than just admiring the energy and hoping.

In the room, ask the questions that reward clarity and quietly embarrass bluster.

What part of this are you most worried about. What would have to be true for this to fail. Who is not going to buy this, and why. What do you not yet know that you would need to know. What has gone wrong so far.

Then listen, carefully, to the shape of the answer. A clear founder meets those questions head on, specifically, sometimes uncomfortably. A founder running on pure spark dodges, reframes, and steers you back to how big it could all be. The questions do not test enthusiasm. Everyone passes on enthusiasm. They test whether anyone is actually seeing straight.

None of this means passion is bad. A founder needs it, and a founder without it will not survive the years this takes. It means passion is fuel and was never a signal, and backers keep reading the size of the flame as if it told them where the car was going.

Your value as an early backer is not that you can feel a founder’s excitement. Everyone in the room feels it. Your value is that you can look past the sparks to whether the person can actually see, and then help a promising one see better.

That is a discipline. It takes the self-control not to be sold by energy, and the skill to coach clarity once you have found someone worth coaching. It is exactly what 75HFB is built to do, separate heat from sight, and then go to work on the sight.

Do that, and you back founders for the thing that predicts the outcome. Skip it, and you will keep funding the brightest flame in the room and wondering why it kept walking into walls.

Every founder has sparks coming out of their arse. Stop grading the sparks. Start looking for who can see.

I created this Substack for business owners working too hard for too little return.

Each article draws on 30+ years as a business owner and angel investor to help you diagnose what’s really holding your business back, cut through the noise, make sharper commercial decisions, reduce avoidable risk, and act on the opportunities that actually matter.

Apply what you read, and you’ll stop confusing effort with progress. You’ll see your business more clearly, make better calls, and start fixing the problems costing you money, momentum and confidence.

Want the next article in your inbox?

Recommend Adrian’s Substack to your readers

Commercial judgement for capable owners who want to stop confusing effort with progress.

Recommend

Reading an article helps with the diagnosis. 75 HFB is where you stop nodding along and start doing the work. It’s also 100% FREE.

Start