Do You Have Company/Entrepreneur Fit?

Aaron Dinin, PhD
4 min readMay 21, 2020
Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash

Most entrepreneurs are familiar with the concept of product/market fit. It’s the degree to which a product satisfies market demand. But that’s not the only kind of fit venture capitalists are looking for when deciding which companies to invest in. They’re also looking for something I like to call company/entrepreneur fit.

Company/entrepreneur fit is when the type of company — and the needs that company is going to have — matches the entrepreneur’s approach to building companies. It’s equally as important to a company’s success as product/market fit, but it’s not talked about as much because it’s harder to quantitatively evaluate. After all, how can potential investors know the inner workings of an entrepreneur’s brain?

Instead of being able to use data to determine company/entrepreneur fit, investors have to rely on qualitative strategies like questions and hypothetical scenarios. Here’s an example of a hypothetical scenario I like to give entrepreneurs in order to see if they’re building the right kind of company.

Imagine I’m handing you $1 million, and you have to immediately invest it — at equal terms and equal valuations — into one of the following two companies using only on the information I’m providing below:

Company A — This business is based around a technology the developers consider…

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Aaron Dinin, PhD

I teach entrepreneurship at Duke. Software Engineer. PhD in English. I write about the mistakes entrepreneurs make since I’ve made plenty. More @ aarondinin.com