How Nicole Junkermann Evaluates an Early-Stage Startup

Reading a company before the numbers

Evaluating an early-stage startup is a different discipline from analysing an established business. There is usually very little to measure: a small team, an unproven product, perhaps a handful of early users, and a great deal of hope. The neat spreadsheets that comfort later-stage investors simply do not exist yet. When Nicole Junkermann assesses a young company, she accepts that uncertainty as the nature of the work and looks instead for the signals that tend to matter most when the data is thin.

Those signals are more human and more qualitative than people expect. At the earliest stage, the quality of the founders, the depth of their understanding, and the honesty of their thinking carry more weight than any forecast. A projection built on assumptions can be made to say almost anything. A founder who truly understands their problem, and is candid about what they do not yet know, is far harder to fake and far more revealing.

This is why Nicole Junkermann treats early-stage evaluation as an exercise in judgement rather than calculation. The point is not to pretend the future is knowable, but to read the few things that genuinely predict whether a small team can turn a hard idea into something real. The sections below set out what she pays attention to, and the spirit in which she does it.

The team comes first

At the early stage, the team is very nearly everything, and this is where Nicole Junkermann begins. A young company will change direction many times before it finds its footing, so what matters is not whether the first plan is perfect but whether the people behind it can learn, adapt and keep going. She has written at length about this in her note on investing in founders, not just ideas, and at the earliest stage that principle is at its strongest.

She looks for a particular blend of qualities. Founders who understand their problem more deeply than anyone else, paired with the humility to keep listening. Conviction strong enough to carry a company through hard years, paired with the flexibility to change course when the evidence demands it. Founders who only have conviction can march confidently in the wrong direction. Founders who only have flexibility can drift. The best teams hold both at once.

Honesty matters as much as brilliance. A team that tells you plainly what is not working yet is far easier to back than one that has a polished answer for everything. The first kind is learning in real time. The second is often performing, and a polished performance tends to crack later, when the problems get harder and the audience less forgiving. For Nicole Junkermann, candour is one of the most reliable early signs of a team worth supporting.

The problem and the market

After the team, Nicole Junkermann turns to the problem the company is trying to solve. She starts there rather than with the product, asking what is genuinely hard here and for whom. A product that makes an already easy task slightly faster rarely justifies the years of effort a real company demands. A product that makes a genuinely hard task possible, for people who needed it badly, is the kind of thing that can grow roots and matter for a long time.

The size and shape of the problem also tell her a great deal about the opportunity. A real, painful, widely shared problem creates room for a company to grow into something significant. A narrow or imagined problem, however cleverly addressed, limits what is possible no matter how good the team. So she weighs not only whether the problem is real, but whether solving it opens onto a market large enough to reward the effort and the patience involved.

Across her interests in artificial intelligence, healthtech, biotech, fintech and deep technology, the common centre is exactly this: important problems rather than impressive demonstrations. Starting with the problem keeps the conversation honest. It is easy to be dazzled by what a technology can do and slow to ask whether anyone actually needs it. She prefers to begin at the other end, with the need, and work back toward the tool.

Early evidence, read carefully

Even at the earliest stage, there is usually some evidence, and Nicole Junkermann reads it with care. Early traction can be a powerful signal, but only the right kind. What she looks for is genuine evidence that real people find a product useful: do they come back, do they rely on it, would they miss it if it disappeared. Those signs are far more meaningful than headline numbers that look impressive but reveal little about whether anyone truly values the product.

She is wary of vanity metrics, the figures that flatter a pitch without proving anything durable. A spike of curiosity is not the same as real adoption. What matters is behaviour, not applause: what users do rather than what they say. This is the same instinct she applies to any technology, an approach she sets out in her note on how she decides which technology to back, where the test is always contact with reality rather than the polish of a presentation.

Where there is little or no traction yet, she does not treat that as disqualifying. Some of the most valuable companies look quiet in their earliest days, especially in deep technology, where the science has to mature before adoption can follow. In those cases she leans more heavily on the team and the problem, and on whatever small, honest signs exist that the work is heading somewhere real. The goal is to read the evidence accurately, not to demand more of it than the stage allows.

Durability and the moat

It is tempting to back whatever is moving fastest, but momentum can be borrowed, bought or simply lucky, and it fades. Nicole Junkermann is more interested in durability: the qualities that might let a young company still matter in five or ten years. Even at the early stage, she asks what could eventually protect this business once others notice the opportunity. A genuine advantage in science or engineering. A product people come to depend on. A team that compounds its own learning faster than anyone else.

None of this is fully formed in a young company, and she does not expect it to be. What she looks for is the seed of it, a plausible reason to believe a real advantage could be built over time. This is closely related to what she seeks in frontier companies more broadly, which she describes in her note on what she looks for in a deep tech company. The early signs of durability are subtle, but they separate a company that could last from one that is merely early.

Durability is also why patience sits at the centre of her approach. The most valuable companies often look unremarkable in their first years, and backing them well means being willing to wait through the unglamorous middle, when the idea is being turned into something dependable. She has written about this directly in her note on why patient capital matters in tech, and it shapes how she reads a young company from the very first meeting.

The questions she keeps asking

None of this reduces to a formula, and Nicole Junkermann would be the first to say so. Judgement is the point. But the questions below capture the spirit of how she reads an early-stage startup before deciding to back it.

• Do these founders understand the problem more deeply than anyone else.
• Are they honest about what is working and what is not yet.
• Is the problem real, painful and widely shared enough to matter.
• Is there genuine evidence that real users find the product useful.
• What could eventually protect this company once others catch on.
• Would patient support help this team through the difficult early years.

Run a young company through these questions and the picture usually becomes clearer, even when the data is thin. The ones worth backing tend to answer them quietly and convincingly, with candour rather than spin. To see how this thinking fits into her wider view, you can return to the work of Nicole Junkermann or read her note on the connections from fintech to biotech. The early stage is uncertain by nature, but read with care and patience, it is also where the most interesting companies begin.

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