At BuenTrip Ventures, we’ve been fortunate to back some of Latin America’s most ambitious B2B founders at the earliest stage, sometimes when they’re just a team and a slide deck.In those moments, there's no revenue to model or traction to validate. What we’re really evaluating is potential, and potential lives inside people.
This is why we take our founder selection process so seriously, and why we believe that founder evaluation is both a human craft and a scientific pursuit.
In early-stage investing, the product will change. The market will shift. Strategy will evolve. But the people, their values, mindset, and ability to adapt under pressure -are the foundation upon which everything else rests.
We often say that early-stage investing is about investing in people, not just ideas. But what does that actually mean in practice?
To answer that question, we first developed an internal framework grounded in our own experience evaluating hundreds of early-stage founders. But we didn’t stop there. To make our approach more robust and scientifically rigorous, since 2022, we’ve partnered with the Behavioral and Decision Sciences department at the University of Pennsylvania. Together, we refined and validated the framework to better understand the behavioral patterns that seem to predict long-term founder resilience, adaptability, and success -what we internally refer to as “BuenTripness.”
As much as we believe in intuition, we also believe in structure.
Behavioral science is critical in venture capital because investment decisions often rely on rapid pattern recognition and intuitive judgments. These mental shortcuts, while efficient, make VCs especially vulnerable to cognitive biases and heuristics that can distort founder evaluation, team dynamics, and risk assessment.
Our due diligence process incorporates a rigorously designed framework to help us apply behavioral science insights consistently. To that end, we use a structured approach to mitigate some of the most common cognitive traps that even experienced investors fall into:
While founder-fit is a vital part of our decision-making, it’s never the whole story.
Behind every investment is a thoroughly researched investment memo that dives deep into market size, timing, and defensibility. We conduct extensive reference checks and stress-test assumptions with domain experts and co-investors. We have in-depth discussions with the product team to identify key strengths, as well as areas where we can add value, leveraging our firm's strengths as ex-founders and operators.
What sets us apart is not just the way we filter ideas; it’s the way we understand people.
BuenTripness is a lens we use to deepen our understanding of the people we partner with. It helps us recognize founders who are not only driven and capable, but who also share our belief in building a community of givers who actively support each other and the broader ecosystem.
Our approach reflects something deeper than due diligence. It reflects the type of community we want to build. We are founder-first because we know that culture is a leading indicator -not a lagging one- of venture outcomes. It’s why our first-check investments in companies like AltScore, Nuvocargo, or Publifyer weren’t based on polished metrics, but on people who showed signs of long-term alignment with our values.
BuenTripness is not a checklist that aims to reverse engineer success. It’s a shared language. A signal of trust. A compass that guides us in uncertain terrain. And we believe it warrants a permanent role. That is why we decided to bring on Ignacio Rosales, our Chief BuenTripness Officer, who can draw on his background in behavioral science to design and guide the evolution of our founder evaluation framework.
If you're a founder, investor, or ecosystem builder curious about how we evaluate, support, and grow alongside our portfolio companies, we’d love to talk.
In venture, processes matter. But people matter more.
