Eye of the Tiger (Ribbit Founder Screen)

The five traits

Asked by David Senra for the traits he looks for in a long-term partner, the investor Micky Malka gives a five-part list drawn from his firm Ribbit Capital's internal framework: the energy of a scientist, the conviction of a missionary, the heart of a partner, the dreams of an athlete, and the obsession of an owner.¹ Each term is chosen against an obvious alternative, and the substitution is where the content sits. Energy, rather than intelligence, of a scientist: rigor is assumed, and what is actually scarce is the appetite to keep running experiments. Conviction, rather than belief, of a missionary: a missionary acts on a belief at personal cost and in hostile territory. Heart, rather than skills, of a partner: the measure is how someone treats the people beside them when it costs something. Dreams, rather than discipline, of an athlete: the scarce thing is the size of what someone believes is available, not their training habit. Obsession, rather than mindset, of an owner: ownership as a compulsion rather than as a stake.

How it was made, and what it is for

The framework took roughly ten years to work out and was compressed onto a napkin about five years before the interview in which Malka describes it. He treats the compression itself as the signal that the work was finished: "if we wrote it on a napkin, it means that we've thought about it long enough that we have it right."¹ He is explicit that the screen is not a returns model. It is a partnership filter for who is worth the long series of correct actions required to become the person a founder calls at three in the morning when something has gone wrong.

Authenticity as the trait named separately

Asked what the founders he has backed share, Malka names authenticity specifically: a founder who still wants to win in their own way, with the mission stated on day one still present later on. His stated indicator for its absence is drift: "the ones that faked it to make it, and then they change, and then they move" are the founders he eventually stops wanting to spend time with.¹ He offers his read of Nikolay Storonsky as the positive case: Storonsky's operating behavior changed completely between his late twenties, when he worked like a machine, first in and last out, and his forties, when he leads through mission and taste with a small number of direct reports, while the underlying drive that started the company did not change at all.

Open questions

Malka partly concedes the limits of the authenticity claim in the same conversation: asked directly whether inauthenticity shows up in company performance, he answers that yes, people who faked it have built massively successful companies, and falls back to authenticity mattering only "sometime somewhere somehow down the line," a standard that is not falsifiable on any horizon he names. More broadly, every one of the five traits is stated positively, so none of them functions as a disqualifier a founder could fail on self-report, and the framework has not been revised in the five years it has existed, including through a period in which Malka says he misread the broader competitive landscape.