Interview process
The interview process.
Where we couldn't find a reason not to offer.
Below is what we saw throughout the process that left us with no question about making the offer.
Curiosity, reasoning, judgement.
Strong opinions, weakly held. Built on a real model of people.
What this value means →What we saw
What you showed us.
You showed us that you approach a problem methodically, starting with what governs everything else and working outward from there. With the LPA in the challenge, you went line by line because you wanted to understand what the document actually said before forming a view, and everything downstream was faster because of that foundation. You raised issues that weren't on the scorecard and suggested the fund could be sharing valuations far more often than the LPA required, drawing on your experience running it for 500 companies a quarter. You think in systems and ask layered questions. Across the process you used the interviews to genuinely understand the business and the long-term opportunity, rather than selling yourself.
Intensity, agency, perseverance.
Bias for action. Resourcefulness. Speed.
What this value means →What we saw
What you showed us.
You showed us that when the existing tools don't do what you need, you build the ones that do. Plinth is the clearest example, built from scratch alongside your day job because you saw what fund admin should look like and the existing options weren't going to get there. You'd built a working wireframe sitting in an airport on a Sunday before most people would have decided it was worth starting. At EF, you ran a multi-jurisdictional group restructure, supported a $200m fundraise, transitioned to a new fund admin on a $1m contract, and held your BAU on top, all at once. Two promotions in under two years at EF, a year-ahead promotion at Grant Thornton before that. You don't wait for problems to come to you, and you don't wait for someone to hand you the right tools.
Adaptability, handling ambiguity.
"I don't know yet" and keep moving.
What this value means →What we saw
What you showed us.
You showed us that you stay composed when the inputs are imperfect and the answer isn't already clear. In both technical tasks, you worked with deliberately broken data and ambiguous LPA terms, and you made reasoned calls rather than freezing or asking for more certainty than was available. The pattern showed up at EF too. Running an AGM from a blank canvas in two weeks, managing the tax profile of an ultra-HNW US-based CEO, teaching yourself Base44, Supabase, Looker and Airtable end to end to build Plinth. You were confident challenging information that didn't fit your expectation, and you updated cleanly when given a counter-argument that held.
Direct communication, honesty.
Strong yes, not lingering orange flag.
What this value means →What we saw
What you showed us.
You showed us that you say what you actually think. You narrated your reasoning out loud through both tasks rather than working silently and presenting a polished output. You spoke honestly about what you had learned, where you had grown, and what you wanted next, without sounding entitled or rehearsed. You explained complex technical decisions clearly to assessors who weren't deep in the domain, and you adjusted depth depending on who you were talking to. You held positions when the argument supported them and changed your mind when it didn't, both without drama.
Long-term and systems thinking.
Second and third-order effects. Leverage over effort.
What this value means →What we saw
What you showed us.
You showed us that you see fund administration as a product problem, not just an operations problem. You built Plinth from scratch because the black box state of fund admin isn't acceptable to you, and you wanted LPs to have real-time visibility into their holdings rather than waiting on quarterly statements. You cleaned EF's deals database at the root rather than patching the outputs, because data integrity upstream is what makes everything downstream reliable. You think in terms of how something will operate at scale and across time, not just whether it works for the case in front of you.
The conclusion
Anything less, we wouldn't have offered.
No reservations to follow up on. No orange flags to talk ourselves out of. Both founders, independently, landed on a strong yes. That's why this offer exists.