Superbuilders and Superthinkers

“We invest in people.” 

This phrase is the VC industry’s most common refrain - yet it often masks a simple truth: most VCs are investing in resumes. They seek out the senior engineer from Stripe, the researcher from OpenAI, or the ML engineer from DeepMind. It’s less about the individual and more about the institutional validation they bring.

At Floodgate, we take a fundamentally different approach. Having spent 16 years vetting teams - often before they even have an idea, or at least the idea that they will end up scaling - we have developed a deeper appreciation for the characteristics of winning teams that can’t be found on a resume. This insight shapes our entire investment philosophy and even influences how we might diligence a company. 

We do this because we have found that product concepts often evolve - sometimes beyond recognition and the founders themselves become the only constant. What follows are the specific characteristics we look for - the qualities that aren’t readily visible on LinkedIn profiles. These markers of exceptional talent appear long before the credentials that other investors chase. They allow us to identify and back extraordinary people before the rest of the world chooses to believe. 

Superbuilders and Superthinkers

At Floodgate, we’ve long believed that the most exceptional founding teams are built around a pairing: a superthinker and a superbuilder. The superthinker shapes markets with insight and narrative. The superbuilder turns ideas into reality through relentless execution. Together, they form a powerful loop of vision and velocity. 

Superthinkers

Superthinkers are deeply strategic, visionary, and relentlessly curious. They ask the right questions before others even see the problem. They know how to frame an opportunity, tell a compelling story, and position a product or service within a broader market narrative.

Historically, superthinkers were defined by instincts like timing, go to market strategy, or customer insight. Today, those instincts are still critical, but are fundamentally augmented by rabid truth seeking. Superthinkers thrive on gathering and synthesizing information, exhibiting exceptional curiosity and building deep contextual knowledge about their domain. They:

• Obsessively collect and analyze information from diverse sources
• Develop a deep understanding of their market’s history, evolution, and power dynamics
• Build strong networks across the old guard and emerging players
• Think laterally across adjacencies, platforms, and potential expansion paths
• Anticipate how competitors may evolve or converge into this space
• Value information and data as much as superbuilders value writing code and creating
• Relentlessly question their own assumptions and seek contradictory evidence to refine their thinking
• Balance conviction with intellectual humility, and move fast when they find truth

They will manifest the above with speed and incredible urgency. Today’s superthinkers have to reach an even higher bar: they must have an intuitive sense of where value will accrue, and where it won’t. 

Superbuilders

Superbuilders thrive in motion - they design systems quickly, test relentlessly, and discard ruthlessly. They are technically gritty, experimentally minded, and unafraid to start over.

Up to this point, superbuilders were defined by their ability to write code fast and hack together prototypes. Today, those same instincts still matter, but they’re applied with more abstraction and leverage. The joy of building is something we see across all superbuilders. They care more about the act of building than they do the attachment to what they already have built. Modern superbuilders will:

• Build fast, but think on a systems and architectural level
• Develop sharp intuition around what models can and can’t do
• Engineer workflows that create predictable, high-quality outputs
• Treat prototypes as instruments for learning, not assets to protect
• Operate with urgency, iteration, and zero attachment to sunk cost to leverage
• Use AI tools to 10x their speed and fill gaps in skill, and have fast recall on the tools available to them

What matters now isn’t how much code they can write, it’s how effectively they can identify the right thing to build, orchestrate solutions, test assumptions, and build adaptable systems that deliver value quickly. Superbuilders still ship fast, but now, they build with leverage, flexibility, and system resilience in mind. 

If you see these qualities in your founding team, please connect with us. At Floodgate, we invest when founders are still exploring ideas up through the seed stage. Our core investments are $500k to $3M – and for our fund, these are the dent making investments, not option bets for future rounds. I only back 4-6 companies every year, so each one counts. They aren’t part of a cohort, they’re companies and founding teams that define our fund.