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AI & I · 2 min · Oct 14, 2026

How Hartman judges an earned insight in early founders

Matt Hartman

Founder & Managing Partner, Factorial Capital

As a Betaworks partner, he was the first investor in Hugging Face, Anchor (bought by Spotify) and Squad (bought by Twitter).

  • NQ

    Natalia QuinteroHost · Head of consulting, Every

    Ran Silicon Valley Bank's Latin American tech portfolio before Every.

About this segment

He measures an insight by how few people were in a position to learn it, since rare insights mean less competition and a longer head start. He also wants founders who ship and learn from the market.

From “How Hugging Face’s Investor Spots Winners”, Oct 14, 2026. Watch the full episode

“I think about that as how many people were in a position to learn the thing that you did.”
Matt Hartmanat 31:47 · AI & I31:47

Takeaways

  1. An earned insight is one few people could have learned firsthand
  2. Widely shared observations attract more competition
  3. He prefers founders who ship early and iterate over solo builders
Watch 2:24 from 31:01

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 18:07Back founders whose pivot foot is technology, not a market3:03
  2. 35:23Vibe coding his own app taught an investor why SaaS still sells2:51

  3. 31:01How Hartman judges an earned insight in early founders2:24

Up next · The Knowledge ProjectTreat your day as 1,000 minutes of money4:00

Transcript

From the transcript AI & I publishes with the episode.

  1. 31:05

    Then your work just gets compounded as a function of time. You know, I'm just curious, how do you filter for that when you're talking to a founder? When you're, you know, when you've met a compelling, you know, technical founder, they're working on an interesting problem. They have a foot that is pivoting. Then how do you measure that they can iterate quickly? I mean, usually when I'm meeting them, they don't think they're pivoting, right?

  2. 31:32

    Because they're like, no, this is definitely the thing. I'm raising money for it. But the... I think that's why the ability to do it is probably more important than what the things you're actually building. So usually I'm trying to understand what is their insight. And people have talked about earned insights. I really like that framing. It's like what is the – I think about that as how many people were in a position to learn the thing that you did.

  3. 31:57

    and then to execute it on it. Because I think that's what earned means. We can all take a look. If there is some observation that we all have, there's going to be more effort put towards solving that problem, which means more competition. If only 10 people in the world have come across this because it's a particular category or particular area of expertise, you're just going to have more time probably and both more time because you'll be ahead.

  4. 32:22

    But also, you're just... you've already spent a lot of time learning that problem and you can go after it directly. And so when I think about like an earned insight, I think that's important. And usually that kind of goes hand in hand with the ability to generate new insights as you are in market, which is again another reason to have your product out there. I think there are people who can like just divine what the right thing is.

  5. 32:48

    I think there's a story about how Figma like was just basically building in, I don't know if it's true, but was building like sort of alone for a year or two. that's not where I've seen company. That's not the pattern that I've seen. It's more common that you put something out there and it's pretty cool. And something starts to, to take off and you just try to delete everything else and, and do that bang because you have been able to generate this before you get that first version.

  6. 33:12

    you know how to do it going forward. So I'm looking for the, I think often it comes down to kind of the why, why, why are you, why is this the interesting, why is this the problem to solve? Or why is this a problem here?