1 min lesson
Values / founder round
Show why this lesson detail matters: "Generic enthusiasm dies here; concrete stories mapped to the values pass."
Step 1 of 3
The founder round screens whether you fit a truth-seeking, high-agency team that ships fast and reaches for AI by instinct. Generic enthusiasm dies here; concrete stories mapped to the values pass.
Pre-build one story per value, each a real situation with a decision and an outcome. The point isn't to recite adjectives, it's to show the behavior happened.
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Full explanation
What the Founder Round Weighs
Interactive diagram. Tab through its regions; each focused region shows its detail in the panel below.
How hard each signal is screened. Truth-seeking carries the most weight because most candidates only assert it.
“I'd built a six-tool routing setup I was proud of. When I actually measured it, the handoffs were the source of most of our SLA misses. I tore it down to one Clay table with an idempotent assignment step - fewer moving parts and SLA hit rate went from the seventies to the high nineties. Killing my own design was the right call once the data was in front of me.”
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Optional practice
Practice: Values / founder round
QWhich behavioral story tends to land hardest in a Cursor founder round and why?