A VC’s guide to picking winners

12 June 2026

What do professional investors want to see when trying to pick winners?

By Tom Bradley, Managing Partner at Salica Investments

UKTN is filled with success stories of how entrepreneurs have turned great ideas into great businesses.

Almost without exception, everyone who has made the journey from drawing board to boardroom will have required outside investment to realise their dreams. But what is it that professional investors want to see when they’re trying to pick winners?

I have been a venture capitalist for 25 years, investing in early-stage tech companies. While we invest in private technology companies at all stages, most of the companies I invest in are less than 12 months old, have very modest if any revenue and seek funding of £1m-£5m.

Picking winners is our job, and we have a good track record having invested in some of the UK’s fastest growing tech startups including Abound, Oxbury Bank, and Lindus Health. Two of these have more than £100m of revenues and £15m of annual profits after less than five years.

Despite this, there is no foolproof formula, and we still get more picks wrong than we get right, but success means making a handful of investments that will return tens of multiples of capital invested. We are not looking for race winners, we are looking for world champions.

Most businesses will alter products and change course many times before landing on a formula for success so while a company’s technical and product skills, market opportunity, business model and unit economics are all vital considerations, early-stage investing is primarily a human pursuit. The people you invest in are by far the most important ingredient of a successful startup.

We think a great deal about the traits we value in the people we back and these criteria form our rubric for assessment.

We begin with mental agility. Founders and leaders must wear many hats. They need to be sales people, fund raisers, strategists, and motivators. They also need high self-awareness to build teams that complement their own strengths, which means recognising their own weaknesses, while being able to hear uncomfortable truths and change course.

We also seek deep drive. This is the power source, whether it comes from a sense of mission, wealth creation or proving people wrong, it sustains a founder and a business when things are tough. It is a reward mechanism in itself – the motivation to do high quality and important work.

Next is what we call ruthless resourcefulness, which means the strength to persevere and the ability to vary tactics to find a way to win. This requires creativity, prioritisation and resilience.

The people we back are calm under fire. Solutions to problems are usually available. The key is having the creativity and presence of mind to find them. The strongest founders will accept setbacks and embrace what they can learn from them.

To build something of scale, founders also need to be calibrated risk takers. Calibrated because there is a difference between seeking risk and being reckless. Founders need to take risks to achieve success, but they need to understand those risks too. The ability to be decisive in the face of ambiguity is key.

Finally, magnetism. People who can persuade, inspire and enthuse are rarer than people who can organise. This quality is essential in persuading other talent to follow a vision.

Identifying these traits is not easy. We conduct semi-formal interviews, but we will also engage founders in different settings. We will have more casual discussions, and endeavour to see people in social settings too. The picture we build up from these interactions allows us to build up a skills map and an understanding of a personality so we can make an assessment that gives us an edge over simple pattern recognition.

It also helps us make counter intuitive decisions.

Received wisdom says joint chief executives are a bad idea, risking confusion internally and externally. But that didn’t stop us investing in Moneybox, the savings and investments app. The joint CEO founders have decades of shared experience and genuinely share the CEO role. We saw complementary and capable characters who demonstrated all of the traits we seek.

Conventional wisdom also favours young entrepreneurs. We are constantly told they have the hunger, they can take the risk, that they are more likely to think differently. This can be right but not always. If we had followed this advice, we would not be the only VC investors in Oxbury Bank, one of the UK’s fastest growing fintechs, whose founders were both in their fifties when we first invested. We saw their abiding energy and the passion but also the detailed understanding of how to access an opportunity built from decades in the industry.  

So, remember, you are the most important asset in your start-up. A business plan is essential, but what we value most when picking winners is people with the skills and character traits to navigate their way through all the twists and turns to eventually achieve success.