M31 Capital
Portfolio Companies · Principles

What we ask of our portfolio companies.

We invest in paradigm shifts, but we invest in people to carry them. These are the principles we ask every founder in our portfolio to hold — not as a checklist, but as the posture we believe produces companies that actually change the world.

We are a hands-on investor. That relationship works when founders and M31 share a set of operating beliefs about how to build. When they diverge, even good companies struggle.

These principles aren't a contract. They're a filter — a way for us and for founders to know early whether we'll be able to work together well. Founders who hold them thrive in our portfolio. Founders who don't, don't.

Truth
  1. 01
    Pursue truth over comfort.
    The founder's job is not to feel good about the company. It is to see the company clearly. That means welcoming information that contradicts the plan, naming the weaknesses on the team, and refusing to protect yourself from what is actually happening. Companies that optimize for comfort die from things they could have seen coming.
  2. 02
    Think in root causes, not symptoms.
    When something is wrong, keep asking why until you get to the actual problem. The quarterly miss is a symptom. The broken sales motion is a symptom. The real cause usually sits one or two layers deeper, in how the team operates or how a decision got made. Solving symptoms wastes a company's time. Solving root causes compounds.
  3. 03
    Be coachable.
    This is not false modesty — coachability is the recognition that your blind spots are, by definition, invisible to you. The founders who let the right people push back on them, and who actually update their thinking when the pushback is right, compound faster than the ones who don't. The ones who don't, stall.
People
  1. 04
    Build a culture where people can speak openly.
    Problems that can be named get solved. Problems that can't, grow. The founding team sets the tone — if the founders model reflection, candor, and the ability to be wrong in front of others, the culture will absorb it. If they model certainty and defensiveness, the company will eventually mirror that too.
  2. 05
    Know yourself.
    The best founders know what they are and aren't good at, and build the team around that honestly. That self-awareness is learnable — through coaching, through personality assessments, through shadowed feedback — but it requires the founder to actually want to know. We will invest heavily on this side; we ask founders to meet us there.
  3. 06
    Hire and fire on the right bar.
    Keeping the wrong person in a critical seat is one of the most expensive mistakes a founder can make. It undermines the culture, slows the team, and eventually costs the company far more than the hard conversation would have. We expect founders to run that conversation honestly and on a reasonable timeline — with our help where it's useful.
Execution
  1. 07
    Hold yourself accountable to the right metrics.
    Not vanity metrics. Not the ones that look good on a slide. The small number of metrics that actually measure whether the company is creating real value and whether it can sustain itself. Report them honestly, review them on a consistent rhythm, and act on what they say.
  2. 08
    Move with urgency, but not desperation.
    Speed matters. Every paradigm shift has a window. But speed without judgment produces churn, and churn destroys compounding. We ask founders to move fast on the things that compound — product, talent, key customers — and to refuse to be rushed on the things that need to be right, like hires, co-founder disputes, and strategic pivots.
  3. 09
    Surface problems early.
    We cannot help with problems we don't know about. Founders who tell us things are fine until they aren't make it impossible for Labs to do its job. We ask for honest, early escalation — and we promise to respond with help, not punishment.
Ecosystem
  1. 10
    Engage the portfolio.
    You are part of an ecosystem, not an island. Take the introductions we make, show up for other founders in the portfolio, share what you're learning, and be willing to help companies that don't directly benefit you in the short term. The founders who engage this way end up with dramatically more reach and leverage than the ones who don't.
  2. 11
    Put the mission first.
    The companies we back exist because they're working on something that genuinely matters — a paradigm shift that will reshape a piece of how the world works. When the company's mission and the founder's ego diverge, the mission has to win. We invest in founders who have already internalized that.
  3. 12
    Build generationally.
    The outcomes we care most about are measured in decades, not quarters. That doesn't mean every decision is long-term — it means that when short-term and long-term pull in different directions, the founder has the discipline to ask which one actually builds the company you want to have existed.

None of these are unusual asks on their own. But founders who hold all twelve, consistently, are rare — and the companies they build are the ones that define paradigm shifts rather than merely participate in them.