Honoré Daumier - caricature
At the end of the day, every founder needs to raise money and sell their idea.
Alexey Guzey, who undoubtedly influences tech investing, has written lists of what makes exceptional talent. There are similar lists: Ben Horowitz seeks independent thinkers with a tolerance for discomfort, and Paul Graham seeks determination and flexibility. Looking for qualitative traits in founders rather than performance statistics is standard in early-stage investing.
But why do investors favor a highly technical founder to be nice? What about a blunt, salesy founder? A founder’s professional style naturally varies across social class, cultural background, age, and education.
In the late twentieth century, the rise of what Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich called the Professional–Managerial Class (PMC) reshaped the norms of elite work. The PMC is composed of credentialed professionals (engineers, managers, consultants, academics) whose authority derives less from ownership and more from specialized knowledge and institutional legitimacy.
Over time, the venture ecosystem came to be dominated by people from this class: former engineers, MBA graduates, consultants, and product managers.
When investors say they want founders who are “thoughtful,” “intellectually curious,” or “mission driven,” these descriptors are rarely neutral. They are signals of cultural compatibility with PMC norms: articulate speech, calm analytical reasoning, moderate confidence without overt aggression, a kind of polite intellectualism.
Raising money and selling products are not PMC-coded activities. They are closer to a trade.
Slovak Peddler, Holperl 1864 (Dorotheum, Vienna)
Sales historically belonged to a different social world: traveling salesmen, brokers, shopkeepers, hustlers. The skill set involves persuasion, improvisation, and status reading. It often rewards bluntness, charisma, and quick social maneuvering more than careful intellectual presentation.
Why expect a highly technical founder to be nice? Investors gravitate toward people who feel socially comfortable with them. But that comfort often reflects familiarity with the class rather than actual company-building ability, and creates inefficiency within the venture ecosystem.
The same is true for clients. The sales techniques that might work on a working-class construction worker wouldn’t work on a culturally corporate investment banker. For sales-focused founders, socioeconomic status shapes how they build relationships. First impressions matter. While seemingly shallow, clothing and mannerisms are important to signal whether “we are in the same social class,” and wearing the right things can dramatically increase your client’s trust in you.
Good products are not technical artifacts. A startup building tools for construction workers, doctors, teachers, or museum curators cannot rely purely on engineering intuition. It must understand the lived reality of those professions. Social awareness and class consciousness are surprisingly useful for founders.
It helps explain why certain ideas resonate with investors but not customers. Investors in AI and robotics startups are more likely to be drawn to video demonstrations of AI producing high-quality work once, and a robot completing a task, yet in both industries, many funded companies have inconsistent products. At my archeology startup, we found that a GIF on our landing page depicting the data appearing in the desired format was much more useful than product quality at conversions.
Raising capital means persuading investors whose norms are shaped by the PMC. Selling means persuading customers whose norms may be entirely different, and engineers must learn to be understandable to the professional world and to create a sense of safety for their clients.
Thank you to N. D. for edits