It's been a year since I started my solo investing platform, investing $50 - 100K cheques into fintech and consumption-led startups. Five investments in so far, including @SimetrikHQ, @Lets_BytePe, @flenthomes, Agara, and @shoffr_in. Indian and global fintech leaders invest alongside me in these companies. This post is partly a reintroduction, and partly me sharing what I actually look for - in case it helps you decide if I'm the right person to talk to. I evaluate roughly 100 companies a month (yes there are that many fintech and adjacent startups!). Somehow, the past two months, the quality of business ideas and founders has skyrocketed and that's got me excited about fintech again. Two things separate the founders I want to back from the rest: ambition, and bias for action. On ambition: recently most founders seem to temper their ambition. Maybe it's VC pressure, maybe it's the fear of sounding naive. So I get pitches that are either too conservative or too vague. I don't want the market size. I want you to paint me a picture of the world you're building. Dream a little. I want to dream with you. If it doesn't work, we all know the capital goes to zero either way. It's my job anyway to evaluate the risk. The only thing I'm optimising for is the upside. So show me the the grand ambition. Quantify that ambition as much as possible. On bias for action: there's no clean way to measure execution speed from a short 30-45 min conversation. So I use a proxy: customer behaviour insights. It's usually the second question I ask founders. And within the first ten minutes, I have a hunch about whether I want to go deeper. I want founders throwing customer insights at me like they're throwing darts. High insights-per-minute tells me you've been in the field, not just in the building. You cannot build in a vacuum and hope customers grab it with both hands, a lot goes wrong when rubber hits the road. Insight only comes from time spent with customers. I'll admit, my bar here is high. I've spent years in this industry and spoken to thousands of customers - enterprise and retail. It's hard to surprise me with insights. But here's the thing: that's also true for someone with just a year or two in the trenches. Everyone knows the standard pain points by now. The differentiation isn't knowing the problem. It's knowing something about the customer that incumbents have stopped noticing, because as businesses scale, their CXOs spend less time with customers, and the ground truth gets stale. An early-stage founder still in the field can out-see them. Action produces information. Talk to customers, form a sharp insight, build, test, iterate, repeat: faster than everyone else. That loop, shortened, is bias for action. If you're building in fintech or consumption-led sectors and think you fit this mold, reach out. I'd love to hear the world you want to build, and the insights you're collecting along the way.