AI can help a founder draft outreach, run campaigns and put a working product in front of customers faster than before. Jennifer (Jen) Richard believes those tools have also changed the environment in which every company has to sell.
The same efficiencies are available to competitors pursuing the same buyers. A customer who once received a limited number of uneven pitches can now face a steady stream of polished emails, targeted messages and automated follow-ups. The tools work, but their widespread use creates more noise around the people founders need to reach.
Jen sees the consequences in the seed-stage companies she evaluates at Bonfire Ventures. Founders can produce capable software with less time and fewer resources, which places more weight on what happens after the product exists. Can they identify the right customer, explain why the product deserves attention and turn early interest into revenue?
The founders Jen sees navigating that challenge well often have experience in sales, partnerships or another go-to-market role. They understand that commercialization is more than sending a larger volume of outreach. They build a visible presence, meet customers in person, participate in industry communities and find ways into the market that do not look identical to every competitor’s playbook.
That has changed the evidence Jen looks for at the earliest stage. Technical ability remains essential, but a founder’s understanding of the customer and ability to create demand now reveal more about whether a product can become a company.
Pattern Recognition Without the Formula
Venture capital relies heavily on pattern recognition, but Jen is wary of letting a familiar founder profile do too much of the underwriting. After about eight years in venture capital, including more than five at Bonfire, she has seen seemingly strong signals fail to predict what happens next. A repeat founder may understand hiring, fundraising and the pressures of building a company, but that experience does not guarantee the next idea is right or that the founder understands its customer. Jen treats prior success as one consideration, not a substitute for evaluating the market and the business.
She finds more useful patterns in how a market works and how its customers buy. She studies the type of buyer a company must reach, how that buyer evaluates new technology and whether the founder understands the organization around the purchase. A founder may have a strong technical insight while lacking a clear view of who controls the budget, what makes the customer hesitate or how the product fits into an existing workflow.
Jen learned to look for those details while operating e-commerce businesses before entering venture capital. She worked across logistics, customer support, websites and engineering teams. She also purchased the B2B software required to run those companies, including Shopify, analytics products and customer-service platforms.
That experience gave her a practical view of how software earns a place inside a business. Buyers do not adopt a product simply because the technology is impressive. They have to recognize the problem, justify the expense and believe the product will fit into the way their teams already work.
Jen now looks for founders who understand that decision from the customer’s side. Some have worked inside the industry they are trying to change. Others have personally purchased or used the kind of software they are building. What matters is their ability to anticipate the customer’s questions before the sales process exposes the gaps in their thinking.
Winning the purchase is only the beginning. The stronger businesses also give customers a reason to keep the product in place.
Software That Becomes Part of the Operation
Bonfire has kept its core strategy as its funds have grown. The firm leads seed rounds in B2B software, takes board seats and makes roughly 10 to 12 investments each year. Its latest fund gives the team more capital, but Jen says Bonfire does not plan to increase its annual investment pace.
The firm is still looking for software companies, including some that operate inside industries shaped by physical systems. Jen points to a robotics investment as an example. The company does not manufacture or own the robots. Its software works within an environment where technology, equipment and human labor are already connected.
That setting changes the cost of replacement. A company can remove a lightweight software tool used to manage email without reorganizing an entire facility. Turning off software connected to 200 robots working alongside people in a warehouse creates a far more consequential decision. The product has become part of how the building moves goods and completes its daily work.
For Jen, the example illustrates what meaningful integration can look like in a market crowded with software. A competitor may reproduce an interface or release a similar feature. It is harder to replace a system that has been deployed inside a complicated operation and adapted to the customer’s workflow.
Those conditions also introduce risk. Selling into warehouses, trucking networks and other operational environments can require longer implementation, deeper customer knowledge and more support. Complexity does not automatically make a company defensible. Founders still have to prove that they can deploy the software efficiently and deliver enough value to justify the disruption of adoption.
Bonfire’s interest lies in founders who can manage that complexity without losing the advantages of a software business. The product must solve a difficult problem, but the company also has to find a repeatable way to sell and implement it.
That combination takes time to build, even as the fundraising market pushes young companies to demonstrate momentum earlier.
Momentum Without the Mirage
The expectations facing early-stage companies continue to move. Jen speaks with founders who still use familiar annual recurring revenue benchmarks as a guide, only to learn that downstream investors now expect more traction than they did several months earlier.
The pressure affects more than fundraising. Customers may view a well-capitalized competitor as more likely to remain in the market. Prospective employees may interpret a large round as evidence that the company has already separated from the field. A startup that raises first can acquire the appearance of category leadership before its underlying performance looks dramatically different from that of its peers.
Jen describes this dynamic as king making. A large, multi-stage investor can place significant capital behind one company in a crowded category, giving it more money to hire, develop products and expand sales. The investment also sends a signal that can shape how the rest of the market perceives the company.
That signal can become useful momentum, but it can also create distance between perception and performance. Jen has seen companies appear far ahead of their competitors at an early stage and later struggle to support the position that funding helped establish.
Bonfire’s founders cannot ignore those market forces. Becoming the last company in a category to raise can make future fundraising more difficult and influence how customers judge the business. At the same time, Jen does not want founders to repeat the growth-at-all-costs behavior that damaged companies during the zero-interest-rate period.
The guidance requires constant adjustment. Founders need enough growth to remain credible with downstream investors, but they still have to focus their product, spend deliberately and build customer demand that lasts beyond the next financing. A rising valuation or large round may strengthen the company’s story. It cannot substitute for adoption.
Part of Jen’s role is to help founders understand which kind of momentum they are creating. A distinction that’s rarely obvious from a revenue chart alone.
Where the Signal Still Lives
Some of the clearest information Jen receives never appears in a formal pitch.
Bonfire hosts dinners, visits founders’ offices, meets their teams and participates in industry events. Jen’s strongest opportunities often emerge through a lunch with another investor, an annual meeting or an informal conversation that supplies context no one would include in a cold email.
Her time at Creative Artists Agency taught her how much can be revealed through conversation. That instinct now serves a more rigorous purpose in venture investing: understanding how a founder communicates when the answer is incomplete, the plan changes or the news is difficult to deliver.
AI can help Jen prepare for meetings, draft responses and clear administrative work. It cannot determine whether she wants to spend the next decade working alongside a founder. At the seed stage, that judgment matters because many of the most important signals about both the person and the company are still impossible to verify.
Jen names integrity as the most important founder characteristic because investors, employees and customers must be able to rely on what the founder tells them. That confidence develops across repeated interactions, particularly when circumstances give the founder an incentive to soften or withhold the truth.
On the day of the interview, Jen was heading to another dinner. The conversation would reach only the people seated around the table, without the scale of an automated campaign or the polish of a formal pitch. In a market producing more messages, products and apparent momentum than any investor can evaluate, the room offers something harder to generate: context.
This season is supported by SVB. Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank. Member FDIC. SVB is a trusted collaborator for the founders pushing boundaries and the investors who back them. We’re proud to have them as our sponsor.
Please note, this podcast is for informational purposes and is not investment, financial, or legal advice. The views expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the position of SVB.
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