Founder Traits And One Big AI Test: How Former NEA Partner Vanessa Larco Picks Winners

In early 2025, Vanessa Larco teamed up with Mercedes Bent to found Premise VC , a firm focused on backing early-stage technical founders building durable, high-growth software. Before that, Larco had spent nearly eight years as a partner at New Enterprise Associates (NEA), one of the world’s largest venture capital firms. There, she served on the firm’s investment committee and led investments across enterprise software, developer tools, and consumer technology, including Evident , Kindred , Cleo , Greenlight , and Mejuri . She also served as a board observer at Robinhood leading up to its 2021 IPO. Vanessa Larcos, co-founder of Premise VC. Known for her sharp product intuition and hands-on operational experience, Larco focuses heavily on helping founders evaluate market dynamics, navigate product-market fit and scale resilient teams. Before transitioning to venture capital, she built a career as a product leader and founder. After earning a degree in computer science with honors from the Georgia Institute of Technology , she began her career at Microsoft working on Xbox and Kinect V1 , before leading core product teams at companies like Twilio and Box . She also founded an app development startup that she successfully ran and sold before joining NEA. Crunchbase News recently sat down with Larco to discuss how changing founder preferences and the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapse drove her to launch a specialized pre-seed and seed fund designed to make early-stage founders a top priority. Among other topics, we also discussed how she evaluates startups based on founder potential rather than initial ideas, looking for teams that leverage AI to make products dramatically faster, cheaper, or easier to use while avoiding rigid, single-model wrappers. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. Crunchbase News: You were at New Enterprise Associates for nearly a decade before branching out on your own. What led you to start your own firm? Was there a specific gap in the market, or was there a premise you felt couldn’t necessarily be fulfilled at a fund that size? Larco: There were a lot of things. At a multi-billion-dollar fund, writing $2 million checks is never going to be a top priority. They invest across all stages, but when you have to deploy between $3 billion and $6 billion depending on how you look at it, it’s impossible to do that $2 million at a time with standard team sizes. Even if you still write those checks, founders have gotten wiser to what it feels like when they are a top priority versus when they aren’t. One founder put it to me this way: “I want my investor at every round to feel like the check size hurt – that it’s a big percentage of their fund – because that’s how I know I’m going to be a top priority when push comes to shove.” So, for a pre-seed round, they want a pre-seed fund where the check size hurts. For a seed round, they want a seed fund where the check size hurts. For a Series A, they want a mid-sized fund where the check size hurts. That frank conversation put a lot into perspective. Founder preferences have shifted over the past few years. Emerging funds over the last three to four years are winning very competitive deals, securing lead slots against more established, bigger firms. This was virtually unheard of before. How has that happened? A side, unintended consequence of the SVB collapse was this change in founder preference. When SVB was going under, every single founder called everyone on their cap table saying, “I can’t make payroll on Wednesday. Can you help me?” Every VC was getting dozens to hundreds of calls. Depending on portfolio size, you can’t help everybody or be on the phone with every single company. Everyone had to prioritize. If firms scraped together money to help cover payroll, they couldn’t cover everyone across the entire portfolio. Very quickly, founders got to see where they sat on the priority list. That’s interesting. As I cover rounds lately, I’ve noticed the lead investors aren’t as often the big mega-funds. Not at pre-seed or seed. Even Series A. You’re seeing less of it happening. Part of it is that fund sizes got really big, so they are writing bigger checks, which inevitably leads to more calculated ROI risk and moving to later stages. Part of it is that founders want to be a top priority, and they saw what happens in a crisis. Founders are on WhatsApp channels, hacker houses, and communities, so one bad story spreads faster than ever. It used to be just repeat founders who wanted specialized, focused firms at the earliest stage for signaling risk and other reasons. Now, even first-time founders hear those stories and want a specialized investor. When customer preferences change in any market, you realize there’s an opportunity. We asked ourselves: “Can we capitalize on this shift? If you were to build something from the ground up targeting this specific ICP, what would you build?” We did what we tell our founders to do: a listening tour. We interviewed people in our ICP and asked: What do you wish you had? What works, what doesn’t, what taglines are you skeptical of, and what is tangibly helpful? We doubled down on what we could provide well and cut out things people assume are best practices that founders don’t actually value. We think of Premise as a startup, and our product happens to be a fund, so it still has to be something people want. Do you invest strictly at those very early stages, or across other stages? Strictly pre-seed and seed. Check sizes range from $500,000 to $3 million. It’s noisy out there. How are you able to cut through that noise to identify real potential versus people riding the AI bandwagon? As a journalist, I struggle with that, so I imagine investors do, too. We spend a lot of time with founders before backing them. During diligence, we talk one to three times a day for three to five days, alongside extensive reference and back-channel checks. Because of that, most of our investments are in cities where we have strong networks, like SF, New York, and Atlanta. We try to get a deep sense of who the person is, what motivates them, and what key attributes they possess. Mercedes and I looked across all the best founders we saw at our previous firms and identified seven core attributes. There isn’t one single persona; founders have different strengths and weaknesses. We look for founders who are world-class in at least two of those seven attributes. In our investment memos, we justify those choices with anecdotes and reference feedback. Nobody is the best at all seven – some attributes even contradict each other. At the pre-seed and seed stages, whatever idea you pitch – while we want it to be a good idea because it shows your ability to plan and generate ideas – the likelihood that it’s what the company looks like in five to ten years is very slim. A lot of it is gauging the potential of the person to find the right market and product fit to build an iconic company. It is tough, but it’s not that different from the crypto, Web3, or early AI waves. Tailwinds always attract fair-weather founders. The core tactics to figure out who really wants to build something interesting, who has unique insight, and who is tenacious enough to endure the ups and downs haven’t changed in the last decade. I’ve seen you discuss AI as a concierge service, shifting from “do-it-yourself” tools to “do-it-for-me” agents. You’ve also mentioned that an AI agent shouldn’t just be a wrapper; it needs to significantly re-architect the cost structure. When looking at a seed-stage deck today, what stands out as evidence that a team actually knows how to fundamentally change that cost structure? Those can actually be two separate things. If a traditional wedding planning concierge service costs $20,000, and you offer it for $1,000, y