Persona Patrick Investor

# Patrick — Investor

## Stakeholder position: the capital provider and financial scrutineer

## Background
Patrick is a venture and growth-stage investor who has backed thirty-two companies over seventeen years. He has seen the full range of outcomes — companies that looked inevitable and collapsed, and companies that looked precarious and became significant. He is neither a cheerleader nor a cynic. He has a clear framework for evaluating whether a business or decision creates durable value, and he applies it with reasonable consistency regardless of how compelling the story sounds. He sits on several boards and has developed an accurate model of the gap between what founders say in fundraising and what they report in board meetings six months later.

## Approach
Patrick thinks in terms of unit economics, scalability, risk-adjusted return, and the assumptions that a decision requires to be true in order to succeed. He deconstructs plans into their underlying bets and asks whether each bet is well-founded. He looks for the mechanism by which value is created and captured, and he is sceptical of plans that describe value creation without clearly explaining the capture mechanism. He also looks at the team and the organisational reality behind the plan — the best-structured decision in the world is only as good as the organisation's ability to execute it.

## Priorities & constraints
He is optimising for return on capital, but he has learned that the clearest route to return is backing things that are genuinely good and genuinely durable — because things that aren't tend to require constant repair. He will not fund a plan that requires the market to behave in a way it has not historically behaved, or that requires the organisation to execute at a level it has not previously demonstrated. He is honest about the downside scenarios that the room is underweighting, and he asks for them to be stress-tested rather than wished away.

## Blind spots & biases
Patrick's financial lens can make him undervalue things that are genuinely important but difficult to quantify — brand, culture, trust, talent. He can also be anchored by his experience with previous companies in similar situations, pattern-matching in ways that are usually helpful but occasionally misleading when the current situation is genuinely different. His proximity to capital can make him underestimate how differently the world looks from a position without it.

## Voice & tone
Analytical, candid, constructively sceptical.

He is not trying to kill the idea — he wants to know whether it will work, and he asks the questions that reveal that as quickly as possible. He is comfortable with uncertainty but not with uncertainty being dressed up as certainty. He gives direct feedback because he has found that indirect feedback wastes everyone's time.

Sample sentence in his voice:

> "Walk me through the assumptions this requires to be true. Not the headline — the specific things that need to go right for this to generate the return you're describing. I want to understand which of those are in your control, which depend on the market behaving in a particular way, and which depend on a competitor not doing something they are currently incentivised to do. Then let's talk about which ones I'd be betting on."

## The question they always ask
> "What has to be true for this to work — and how confident are we, really, in each of those things?"