He’s Invested in 100+ Startups — His Surprising Rule for Spotting ‘Real Builders’? Their Shoes
The cofounder of Instacart has an unusual method to assess whether founders are legitimate.
Key Takeaways
- Max Mullen is the cofounder of Instacart and a tech investor who has invested in over 100 startups.
- He said on a podcast earlier this month that he looks at founders’ shoes to determine if they are the “real deal.”
- He said that “real builders” wear “dirty white sneakers” and noted that the founders who care the least about looking polished are usually the ones who are most invested in their companies.
Max Mullen can tell a lot about a founder by the state of their shoes.
The Instacart cofounder and tech investor, who has invested in over 100 startups, told the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast earlier this month that he has a trick for evaluating founders. At the seed stage, when it’s difficult to tell who the “real deal” founders are, he starts “looking down.”
“If you’re looking at a founder and they got dirty white sneakers, you’re a real builder,” Mullen said.
At founder dinners, demo days and startup events, he noticed a pattern: the founders who care the least about looking polished are usually the ones crashing on the office couch and working on their startups nonstop. The best founders don’t wear designer sneakers or high-tech running shoes, just plain, white, lace-up tennis shoes that are “filthy,” he said.
“They don’t have time to buy nice sneakers,” Mullen said. “They just put on the same pair of sneakers, and they get dirty.”
How the sneaker test works in practice
Mullen gave the example of one portfolio company to make his point. Rahul Behal, cofounder of AI automation startup Gumloop, wore “dirty” sneakers that were so beat-up they were practically “falling apart,” Mullen said. He noted they were in such rough shape that he ended up buying Behal a new pair of sneakers himself.
“Cheap Nikes, New Balance or anonymous-looking Adidas,” Mullen wrote in a blog post earlier this month. “The kind of dirty that would bother you if you had five spare minutes a week to think about it. But great founders don’t think about it. They don’t even notice.”
There’s another type of founder with “perfect sneakers” and a “perfect cardigan,” Mullen explained. They spend their limited time “signaling that they’re a great founder rather than spending every ounce of their energy becoming one,” he wrote.
However, Mullen cautioned that “dirty white sneakers are a symptom, not a cause,” meaning that the state of a founder’s shoes is just a visible sign of what’s going on underneath, and is not the factor that creates the outcome.
“You cannot buy a pair of gross Allbirds on Thursday and become a better CEO by Friday,” Mullen wrote in the post. “So please, don’t change your footwear on account of a blog post. In fact, wear whatever shoes bring you joy. Dirty white sneakers or not, when you meet someone really locked in, you can tell — real builders just look the part.”
Key Takeaways
- Max Mullen is the cofounder of Instacart and a tech investor who has invested in over 100 startups.
- He said on a podcast earlier this month that he looks at founders’ shoes to determine if they are the “real deal.”
- He said that “real builders” wear “dirty white sneakers” and noted that the founders who care the least about looking polished are usually the ones who are most invested in their companies.
Max Mullen can tell a lot about a founder by the state of their shoes.
The Instacart cofounder and tech investor, who has invested in over 100 startups, told the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast earlier this month that he has a trick for evaluating founders. At the seed stage, when it’s difficult to tell who the “real deal” founders are, he starts “looking down.”
“If you’re looking at a founder and they got dirty white sneakers, you’re a real builder,” Mullen said.
