By Eddie Washington, Operating Partner, Touring Capital
Behind every exceptional company is a founder who can turn an ambitious vision into an enduring organization. Technology creates opportunity, but the ability to attract exceptional talent, build high-performing teams, and lead through uncertainty is often what determines whether that opportunity translates into lasting success.
Over the course of my career in executive recruiting, I’ve worked alongside early-stage founders as they navigate some of their most consequential decisions: whom to hire, when to evolve their leadership teams, and how to build organizations capable of scaling alongside their ambitions.
At Touring Capital, rigorous, evidence-based investing has always been central to our philosophy. That extends beyond evaluating markets, products, and technology to understanding the founders and leadership teams responsible for turning ambitious ideas into exceptional businesses.
It’s a philosophy that strongly resonates with my own experience and one that I’m excited to help advance.
As Operating Partner focused on Talent and Founder Community, my role spans three interconnected priorities: further strengthening our approach to founder diligence, helping portfolio companies build exceptional leadership teams, and cultivating a community where experienced founders can learn from and support one another.
Before the Investment: Advancing Our Approach to Founder Diligence
Great founders don’t fit a single archetype. They bring different backgrounds, leadership styles, and experiences to company building. But across those differences, certain qualities consistently warrant deeper examination.
Building on Touring’s established approach to founder evaluation, I developed the Touring Founder Diligence Framework in collaboration with our investment team. The framework brings together my experience assessing executive talent and leadership potential with the team’s collective investment experience and judgment, creating a more systematic approach to evaluating the people behind the companies we back.
The framework centers on three core dimensions:
- Drive and resilience. What motivates a founder to pursue this particular opportunity? How do they respond to adversity, navigate uncertainty, and maintain conviction when circumstances become difficult? We look beyond ambition to understand the underlying motivations and resilience required to build something enduring.
- Conviction and coachability. Exceptional founders balance strong conviction with intellectual flexibility. They know when to stay the course and when new evidence demands a different approach. This is especially critical in AI, where rapidly evolving technologies and business models challenge even the assumptions of experienced operators.
- Talent magnetism. A founder’s ability to attract, inspire, and empower exceptional people is among the most important indicators we examine. Do talented people choose to work with them repeatedly? Can they recruit leaders who bring capabilities beyond their own? And can they create an environment where those leaders have the autonomy and trust to thrive?
Beyond these dimensions, we evaluate the alignment between founders and their prospective board partners. The strongest partnerships are built on mutual trust, shared expectations, and a clear understanding of how to navigate difficult decisions together.
Ultimately, our diligence seeks to answer two fundamental questions: What gives us conviction in this founder, and what could meaningfully challenge that conviction?
The objective isn’t to reduce founder evaluation to a formula. It’s to build on the rigor of our existing investment process by combining empirical signals with experienced judgment, enabling more thoughtful investment decisions and a deeper understanding of how we can support founders from day one.
After the Investment: Building Leadership Teams for Scale
Our work doesn’t end when we make an investment. In many ways, that’s when our understanding of a founder becomes most valuable.
The insights developed during diligence help inform how we partner with founders as their companies grow. Every company faces different organizational challenges, and the leadership capabilities required at one stage may look very different at the next.
My role is to help founders anticipate and navigate those transitions.
That includes advising on organizational design, leadership assessment, executive hiring, and recruiting strategy. We work with founders to define critical roles, identify and engage exceptional candidates, select the right executive search partners, and build effective founder-led recruiting processes.
We also help emerging companies compete for talent against significantly larger organizations, from articulating a compelling equity story to developing thoughtful compensation strategies.
But our ambition extends beyond filling individual positions.
The goal is to help founders build enduring organizational capabilities: the judgment to recognize exceptional talent, the discipline to make strong hiring decisions, and the leadership infrastructure to scale effectively.
We reinforce this work by connecting talent leaders and in-house recruiters across our portfolio, creating opportunities to exchange practical insights, share resources, and learn from one another’s experiences.
Ultimately, exceptional recruiting shouldn’t depend on any one search or individual. It should become an institutional strength.
Beyond the Investment: Building a Community of Founders
Some of the most valuable advice a founder can receive comes from someone who has confronted the same challenge firsthand.
That’s the principle behind Touring’s founder community: creating meaningful connections among entrepreneurs who can share hard-won experience, challenge one another’s thinking, and help each other navigate the complexities of company building.
Within our portfolio, we encourage direct relationships among founders, enabling them to exchange perspectives and practical guidance without needing Touring to facilitate every interaction.
Whether it’s hiring a first sales leader, evolving a go-to-market strategy, or navigating the transition from founder-led execution to a scaled leadership organization, these conversations are often most valuable when they happen between peers.
Our community extends beyond the portfolio through Touring Builders, our Founder LP program.
Touring Builders brings together a select group of accomplished founders who invest alongside us as limited partners and contribute their experience to the broader Touring ecosystem.
Through focused working sessions, strategic discussions, and direct engagement with our portfolio companies, Builders share insights on challenges ranging from go-to-market execution and category creation to enterprise expansion and organizational scaling.
This creates something more enduring than a traditional network of advisors. It is a community of founders with a shared stake in the success of the next generation of companies.
Our aspiration is to build a network where knowledge compounds, relationships deepen, and the experience of one founder becomes an advantage for many others.
An Integrated Approach to Investing in People
What excites me most about my role at Touring is how naturally these three priorities reinforce one another.
Our diligence framework builds on Touring’s longstanding commitment to thoughtful, evidence-based founder evaluation. The insights we develop inform how we support founders as they build and scale their organizations. And through our founder community, the knowledge and experience gained along the way become resources for the broader portfolio.
Throughout my career, I’ve believed that evaluating and recruiting exceptional talent should be approached with both rigor and human judgment. At Touring, we have the opportunity to extend that philosophy across the entire investment lifecycle.
Because investing in exceptional companies begins with understanding exceptional people. And helping those people build enduring organizations is how we turn conviction into lasting partnership.