Brett Calhoun on Why Pre-Seed Investors Should Stop Reading Résumés

Brett Calhoun’s objection is practical rather than moral. Pattern matching is a bet that the next outcome will look like the last one, which in a market where the cost of building has collapsed and the founder base has widened is an increasingly poor assumption. It also compounds. A firm that funds the same profile repeatedly sees more of that profile, and the filter calcifies into a worldview.

The effect at the margins is that a great many capable founders never get a first meeting, not because they were assessed and rejected, but because they were never legible to the filter in the first place.

Scoring Habits Instead of Résumés

Redbud’s alternative is to assess behavior directly. The firm uses structured personality assessment and founder habit scoring as a formal part of diligence, rather than as color added after an investment decision has already been made on instinct.

The distinction matters. Most firms treat founder evaluation as the subjective part of the process, the bit that happens over coffee and gets written up afterward as conviction. Redbud treats it as the part most worth systematizing, on the grounds that it is the only variable that reliably predicts anything at a stage where the product will probably change twice before launch.

What the process looks for is set out plainly. Brett Calhoun’s stated filter is founders “strengthened by struggle with no bias towards pedigree.” Underneath that sits a hierarchy he has been consistent about in public: “Resilience for us is like the number one thing,” with integrity as a precondition rather than a scoring category. A founder who fails the second is not scored on the first.

Redbud deploys on a rolling basis rather than in cohorts, and has issued term sheets within twenty-four hours of a final partner call.

Brett Calhoun treats that speed as a consequence of the process rather than an act of aggression. A firm that knows what it is measuring can decide quickly. A firm relying on consensus and pattern recognition needs weeks, several more meetings, and usually a warm introduction from someone it already trusts, which is the pedigree filter arriving through a side door.

The speed also changes who the firm can compete for. At pre-seed, a founder with momentum is not going to wait six weeks for a maybe, and the funds that move slowest see the best companies exactly once.

The composition is the evidence. Sixty-one percent of Redbud founders are first-time entrepreneurs. Forty-five percent are immigrants. Forty-eight percent have roots in the Midwest.

The portfolio spans AI, hardware, software and vertical technologies, and it is not clustered in one place. OneImaging, now based in Miami, has raised $38 million. Transend reached profitability on more than $7 million in annual recurring revenue. Layer 9 is building in New York, while Trially and dScribe AI were both built in Kansas City and Focus, a legal technology company, won Missouri Startup Weekend in 2025. Atlas is also in the portfolio, and Brett Calhoun was the first venture investor into Trestle.

Redbud closed a $25 million second fund in March 2026, five times the size of its first, and added a further $10 million for an Opportunity Fund in August. Fund II targets roughly forty companies.

Brett Calhoun’s argument against the pedigree filter has a second half, which is that a firm selecting for resilience over polish takes on an obligation afterward.

A founder backed for grit rather than for network does not arrive with the network. Redbud runs a support layer around the capital that has generated more than five hundred targeted introductions for portfolio companies, which have collectively raised roughly $200 million in follow-on capital. The firm was renamed from its original accelerator structure in August 2023 specifically to put that support on a permanent footing rather than running it in cohorts.

That is the part Brett Calhoun treats as the actual product. Writing the first check into an overlooked founder is a position, not a favor, and the position only pays if the firm closes the gap that caused them to be overlooked.

The methodology makes a claim that can be checked, which is rarer in venture than it should be. If habits and resilience predict outcomes better than credentials do, a firm scoring for them should back companies that firms scoring for pedigree systematically miss, and those companies should perform.

Forty-three teams is enough to have conviction and not nearly enough to have proof. Brett Calhoun is explicit that the answer takes a decade and that the interim metrics everyone quotes, including his own, are at best directionally useful. What he will say is that the alternative, a process that cannot explain why it believes what it believes, has been the industry standard for long enough to have earned some scrutiny.