Find founders like Indiana finds football players

Back in 2023, a reporter asked incoming Indiana football coach Curt Cignetti how he planned on getting athletes to come play for Indiana:

Reporter: “When you recruit them how do you sell them the vision?”

Cignetti: “It’s pretty simple, I win. Google me”.

This will go down as one of the coldest lines in sports history, because 2 years later Cignetti led his team to the most improbable national championship run.

The significance of this cannot be understated - Indiana’s football program quite literally sucked before Cignetti. From the Ringer:

To enter that environment and go from the bottom of the barrel to the absolute best in 2 years is really impressive, and involves more than just dumb luck.

I did some digging to see what exactly Cignetti did to complete Indiana’s staggering turnaround. Not his strategies on the field, but in the team he put together.

And what I found carries over to the world of startup investing more than I could have imagined.

Every national champion since the birth of the modern recruiting industry has had at least 50 percent of its roster composed of players who were once four- or five-star recruits.

Indiana’s team had just 8% of these players on their roster when they took home the trophy. This was by design, as Curt Cignetti had found a loophole in the world of modern college football.

But to explain this properly, I need to give some context on what’s transpired in college football over the past few years.

The old playbook was to recruit players with the highest potential (4 and 5 star recruits), develop them over 4 years, and then reap the benefits.

NIL is the inflection point that changed everything.

Because of NIL, nearly every school can compete for top players by paying them. Alabama, Georgia, and Clemson no longer have a stranglehold on the nation’s best players.

This has resulted in players entering the transfer portal and swapping schools like they’re gifts at a white elephant party.

Curt Signetti realized that it no longer made sense to go after the high potential guys, as they wouldn’t be around long enough for Indiana to reap the benefits. After a year they would get lured away to school offering money OR declare for the NFL draft.

Attempting to develop raw-talent players over time was a playbook that no longer worked. After all, the championship isn’t played every 4 years, you want to win this season.

And that bring us to one of Curt Cignetti’s core philosophies: production over potential.

Production over Potential is the idea that you want to recruit and play athletes who are performing on the field right now. And that you should prioritize them over raw talent moonshot-type players.

There may be an undersized linebacker who doesn’t have top speed but has great instincts, technique, and passion that enables him to make 9+ tackles a game. Conventional wisdom would have said to pass on that player because his potential is capped by his size and speed.

Instead, coaches were opting for the 6 foot 7, 300-pound linebacker who only played football for a year and didn’t have deep experience of the game yet. That player might become a top-tier player in 3-4 years, but the odds are he won’t be an impact player right away.

Cignetti recognized this in the post-NIL college football world.

He didn’t care what a player might become in four years. He cared what they could do on Saturday.

Instead of recruiting high school stars with theoretical upside, Indiana went hunting in the transfer portal for players who had already proven something at the college level. Guys who had snaps. Film. Box scores. Production you could point to without squinting.

It was less “trust me, this kid will be special someday” and more “here’s the tape, here’s the stat line, here’s the result.”

And when you stack a roster full of those players, something interesting happens:

You stop waiting for the future to arrive. And you start winning now.

This exact dynamic plays out in startup investing - especially in equity crowdfunding.

Most early-stage investors are trained (or conditioned) to hunt for potential:

That’s the four- and five-star recruit of startups.

And to be clear: there’s nothing wrong with potential. Some generational companies start that way.

In venture capital, there are entire firms built to underwrite people.

These are teams with decades of pattern recognition. They’ve seen thousands of founders. They’ve watched who burns hot for six months and fades, and who keeps showing up year after year when the novelty wears off.

They’re very good at spotting what I’ll call “hobby hunters”.

These are founders who:

VCs know the tells. They know which questions to ask.

Retail investors don’t get that luxury.

In equity crowdfunding, you don’t have a Monday partner meeting where ten people debate founder psychology. You don’t have backchannel references from prior investors or years of institutional scar tissue to rely on.

What you do have is evidence.

Which is why production matters so much more in this ecosystem. Production is evidence of perseverance, traction, and problem-solving. Has the founder:

Evidence like that can greatly reduce the risk that the startup is led by an unserious person LARPing as a founder. I’ve unfortunately invested in a few of these unserious characters.

I remember one in particular early on that had their bio written out as ‘5X FOUNDER’ which seems to check the box of experience. Had I dug into what those previous companies became or if any had exited, I would have discovered that he had produced nothing of value.

And to little surprise, he produced nothing of value with that 6th startup either.

I know that there is some small percentile of founders that absolutely crush it with no evidence of previous production, those cases will exist. But I am comfortable ‘missing out’ on those few outliers to protect myself from the unserious founders that have trickled into equity crowdfunding raises.

And to end on a positive note, here are a couple of founders I’m following who are crushing it on production:

Countless others, but you get the point. Now go out there and win a Natty with a high production guy.

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