Agency, Taste, Curiosity

Agency (Study for a New Virtue), 2026 — an Art Deco homage to Lee Lawrie’s Rockefeller Center reliefs, one of my favorite outdoor works in NYC

In 2026, the one “soft skill” I want to get much better at spotting before we commit to a new investment is agency. I didn’t always have that word in my vocabulary, but looking back, we were selecting for it the whole time. When we compare our best-performing founders against public benchmarks, there’s a pattern that’s hard to unsee: the ones doing unusually well almost always signaled agency in the first iteration.

Agency is the difference between being pushed by life and steering it. As Albert Bandura wrote, “to be an agent is to influence intentionally one’s functioning and life circumstances” (Bandura, 2006, p. 164).

Agency matters more now because the cost of execution collapsed. With AI, a single founder can do in a weekend what used to take a squad a couple of months, and once that becomes true, the bottleneck moves. In B2B software, the two hard parts used to be building and selling. Now AI compresses both. So when a team isn’t moving, it’s rarely because they lack tools. It’s because they lack agency.

One heuristic we’ve always liked at SaaSholic is simple: we want to back companies that are already moving. Not necessarily huge, but already winning early battles and growing fast in a way that suggests capital is gasoline, not oxygen. With our capital, they don’t suddenly become good. They become even better and even faster. The best founders don’t treat fundraising as a prerequisite, or as a bottleneck. They build anyway, sell anyway, learn anyway, and if they’re right, reality starts bending before anyone wires money.

A proxy I still love is that the best founders land their first ~20 non-affiliated customers before institutional money. Not friends, not family, not a pilot that exists because someone likes them. Real customers who complain, demand features, and still pay, because whatever they’re getting is meaningfully better than what they used to have. These founders also tend to have receipts, almost by default. They don’t tell you they’re moving, they show you. Screenshots, Looms, dashboards, a pipeline list, customer quotes in Notion, some kind of weekly cadence. Not to impress investors, but because that’s how they operate.

But motion alone can be circular. High agency without direction turns into noise. So right after agency, we look for two stabilizers that keep that motion pointed toward an outcome: taste and curiosity.

Taste gets misunderstood because people think it’s aesthetics or vibes. In B2B software, taste usually looks like product empathy and strategic minimalism. It’s knowing which 10% of features solve 90% of the problem, and having the discipline to ignore the rest. AI makes it easier to ship more. Taste is what stops founders from shipping the wrong more.

Curiosity is what keeps founders close to truth. Markets move too fast for rigid people. Curious founders keep asking why, keep running experiments, and keep changing their mind when reality disagrees. They don’t defend assumptions. They stress-test them. The most dangerous founders aren’t the ones who don’t know. They’re the ones who stop being curious.

So the trio that seems to matter most in 2026 is agency, taste, and curiosity, in that order. Agency creates motion. Taste prevents wasted motion. Curiosity keeps the motion aligned with what’s real.

You can see all three in the first conversations, especially if you don’t let the conversation drift into pedigree. I genuinely don’t care where you studied, if you even studied, if you’re from the countryside, if your English is broken, who your advisors are, who invested before. If you have agency, you’ll learn what you need. If you have taste, you’ll avoid obvious traps. If you have curiosity, you’ll keep adapting. So we start with what matters: what have you built so far, what did you ship in the last 14 days, and show us the last 6 to 12 months of metrics. If it’s too early for metrics, show evidence instead. Pipeline, retention, usage, customer conversations, whatever is real.

Over time, this pattern has held up better than we expected: founders who show agency early almost always keep compounding. It doesn’t make the path linear, but it makes progress inevitable.

And I’ll end with a dumb but brutally accurate proxy we’ve noticed. Every company we’ve backed that sends their investor update on time, consistently, for 12+ months, is tracking top-decile expectations. We can’t say the same for the ones that miss it. That’s not organization. That’s agency.