Brendan Dickinson (Stern MBA '11) is a General Partner at Canaan, an early-stage VC firm, where he leads their Fintech practice. He's been there since 2010 and focuses on fintech infrastructure and platform companies. Previously he was a senior quantitative analyst at Lehman Brothers and Barclays Capital. Brendan spoke candidly in an "Ask me Anything" format to the 10 Summer Launchpad teams on their second day of the accelerator. Of course, what was top of mind for the founders was, so how do you get the second meeting with an investor? What are they really looking for?

He's built a structured framework for fintech investing that categorizes opportunities across infrastructure, distribution, and new financial products,  focused on infrastructure and platform companies rather than consumer apps. Portfolio includes Paxos, Embroker, Ladder, RenoFi, Taptap Send. 

Few people in the room had a more direct line to what investors actually think than Brendan Dickinson, General Partner at Canaan, a firm that has backed early-stage founders for over three decades, with a portfolio spanning fintech infrastructure heavyweights like Paxos, Ladder, and Taptap Send. With a background that runs from quantitative analyst at Lehman Brothers to NYU Stern MBA to GP at one of New York's most established venture firms, Dickinson has sat on both sides of the table. He knows what a fundable founder looks like, and he told the cohort straight.

The answer wasn't traction. It wasn't TAM. It was confidence.

Not the performed kind, not the founder who memorized their deck or rehearsed a crisp answer to "what's your moat." The real thing: the kind of quiet, grounded certainty that signals to an investor that this specific person has the capability to pull this off. That they've thought harder about this problem than anyone else in the room. That when things inevitably break, and they will, this is someone who won't.

That confidence has to extend to the numbers too. Dickinson has been outspoken about intellectual honesty as the foundation of any serious business, his view is that metrics like customer lifetime value (LTV) and customer acquisition cost (CAC) are easy to manipulate, and that there's no point managing to a number that isn't actually quantifying what you think it is. Early-stage metrics don't need to be perfect, he's argued, but founders need to understand exactly where they stand and articulate the bet they're making on scale. An investor will do their own work. What they're evaluating, underneath the math, is whether the founder sees their business clearly.

Charisma, expertise, the ability to command a room: Dickinson reframed these not as personality traits but as investor signals. A pitch isn't just a business case. It's an audition in conviction. VCs are pattern-matching constantly, on markets, on models, on timing, but underneath all of it, they're asking one question: do I believe this person?

It's a lens Dickinson applies to himself too. His biggest misses as an investor weren't bets that went wrong, they were moments when he talked himself out of a strong initial gut reaction. The founders who earned his conviction, and held it, were the ones who got the check.

For a room full of founders preparing for their next investor conversation, the message was: polish the deck, know your numbers, be honest about what they do and don't show, but don't lose the thing that no slide can show.

Brendan Dickinson on what investors are really evaluating:

"Does the founder have the capability of pulling it off? It's how you portray yourself and your expertise."