I recently found myself returning to Angela Duckworth’s seminal book on grit. She defines it as the marriage of perseverance and passion toward long-term goals, making a persuasive case that grit predicts success far more reliably than raw IQ or innate talent.

Having worked with dozens of early-stage startups, Duckworth’s thesis rings true. In entrepreneurship, talent is conspicuous. You can evaluate technical skill through a demo, gauge sales acumen by sitting in on prospective customer calls, and glean charisma within the first five minutes of a pitch. Factors like school credentials, promotion velocity, and athletic achievements, meanwhile, are evident from scanning a CV or LinkedIn profile. Grit, by contrast, operates in infrared. It reveals itself only over time, through friction, when things go to pieces.

But intangible does not mean undetectable. Treating grit as an untestable, quasi-mystical virtue would be an underwriting error. Investors often confuse grit with stoic suffering or dogmatic obstinacy. But banging your head against a concrete wall does not break the wall. Grit isn’t just about stubbornly pushing through pain. It’s about how quickly a founder bounces back from setbacks and turns bad feedback into better results.

So how do you assess grit?

1. Measure the Delta, Not Just the Pedigree

Credentialism is a persistent blind spot in venture. When investors lean too heavily on pedigree (e.g. the Stanford degree or unicorn tenure), they risk missing exceptional founders who have traveled extraordinary distance. While there is certainly signal-value in gaining admission to an MIT or Harvard (which requires plenty of grit to begin with), or working at an OpenAI or Stripe, these signals must not overshadow other factors. Over-indexing on credentials can blind us to exceptional founders who have driven exceptional outcomes through pure execution rather than pedigree. The how is always more important than the where, and we want to see people who made the most of whatever institutional context they found themselves in. Folks who work a job through school, or who actively create value outside of their primary swim lane, signal a degree of stamina and capacity that institutional scoring systems often fail to capture.

This is not to suggest that grit is antithetical to prestige. Plenty of individuals from privileged backgrounds develop grit in spades, and they are all the more formidable for it. But pedigree only tells you an individual’s altitude at a given moment. Grit is better approximated by measuring the distance they’ve climbed.

A founder who bootstrapped an unsexy B2B workflow tool to six figures with zero institutional capital, and without the baked-in advantages of an elite network, signals far more grit than someone who has only ever operated inside a well-resourced enterprise with an institutional safety net. To underwrite grit, focus on the distance between Point A and Point B.

2. Stress Test Tactical Adaptiveness

Another thing sometimes mistaken for grit is sheer stubbornness. But there is a crucial distinction between the two qualities. Where stubbornness is static, clinging to a failing strategy out of a dogmatic refusal to surrender, grit is dynamic. Grit means staying committed to your goal while remaining adaptive to the environment around you.

When macroeconomic shocks or existential questions arise, this ability to process new data and pivot becomes a company-saver. Krystle Mobayeni and her team at BentoBox offer a prime example of this sort of adaptiveness. By 2019, the company had established itself as a provider of elegant, mobile-first websites and centralized analytics for restaurants. But then the pandemic posed a grave threat to their business. Mobayeni pivoted her strategy to meet restaurants where they were. She unbundled BentoBox’s services to provide a comprehensive suite of digital survival tools, expanding far beyond website design to include pre-order capabilities, catering, e-commerce, and marketing. By adapting her product to be exactly what her customers needed at a critical juncture, she helped them not only survive, but thrive. The company was acquired by Fiserv in 2021 and is now a key component of Clover’s ecosystem.

3. Look Where the Finger Points

Grit isn’t only stamina and intensity. It’s also about being clear-eyed about the inevitable turbulence ahead. When trouble arises, first-level thinkers tend to attribute that trouble to external variables. The market turned, or procurement succumbed to bureaucracy, or an unsophisticated buyer failed to grasp a key differentiator. This is an understandable human reaction, but when it comes to building companies, it is a dangerous one. Harsh macro conditions and resistant buyers are not signs of rotten luck; they are the baseline reality when you set out to build something from nothing.

In diligence, I often ask founders to highlight some of the recent challenges they faced. I do this not out of some sadistic impulse, but rather as a means of gauging their thoughtfulness: do they recite an alibi, or conduct a true post-mortem? While admitting to failure might seem daunting in a diligence setting, it earns far more credibility than deflective hand-waving. To the gritty, adversity is just a natural part of a startup.

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In the final analysis, early-stage venture is not an exercise in underwriting certainty; it is an exercise in underwriting how someone operates when certainty is nowhere to be found. As generative AI makes it easier than ever to spin up a convincing prototype, the true competitive advantage in the startup landscape will not be found in pedigree or polish. It will belong to founders who can absorb harsh feedback, discard broken assumptions without ego, and sustain momentum through the quiet, unglamorous stretches without relying on external validation.