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AI Interviews for Founders: A First Call for Every Application

Tracy team 6 min read

In short

Tracy AI Interviewer gives every applicant a first conversation from one link in your application form.

She asks your diligence questions, follows up on the answer and leaves partners a recording, transcript and assessment per question.

A Director at a top-tier early-stage VC went from around six hours a day of founder screening to about 1.5 hours.

A partner decides. Next: create an interview for your programme.

We make Tracy AI Interviewer.

A programme opens applications on a Monday, and by Friday the inbox holds more founders than the partners have hours to meet. Founders with a polished form can get the calls. A founder with a sharper story and a thinner write-up never reaches one. A form cannot ask a founder to explain a number, and a partner cannot meet everyone.

Tracy AI Interviewer gives every applicant that first conversation. She asks about the company, follows up on what the founder says and waits for the end of the thought. Partners read a recording, a timestamped transcript and a written assessment for each question. Our applications page shows the flow from form to report, and our guide to the accelerator interview covers the interview from the programme's side.

Use Tracy for the first founder interview when applications arrive in a rush, when partners meet only the first slice of them, or when you want every founder asked the same opening questions. Skip it when your cohort is small enough for partners to meet every founder. A form and a call are enough then.

What does a founder interview need to find out?

Techstars says its staff personally review every application, and a Managing Director there says the first interview aims to understand a company well enough to write an investment memo. He asks founders to be ready on four things: the customer and the pain, speed and execution, market size, and what is different. Y Combinator describes 10-minute conversations with 2 to 3 partners who have read the application, and says the first question is usually what the company is working on.

A form can hold those answers. It cannot ask a founder what they learned from the customers who left, and that follow-up is the job of the first interview. See one-way versus two-way video interviews for the format difference.

Eight opening questions for a first founder call

Use six to eight, in any order, and ask the follow-up only after you have heard the first answer. The table is ours, adapted to the four areas above. Tracy takes your own questions, so you can load these as they stand. For a longer bank, see founder interview questions.

  1. What is the company working on, and who is it for?

    Follow up with
    Who paid you last, and what were they using before?
    Listen for
    A named buyer and the thing it replaced.

  2. What did the last customer who left tell you?

    Follow up with
    How many left for that same reason?
    Listen for
    A count and a cause, not a mood.

  3. What did you build first, and what did you leave out?

    Follow up with
    What did leaving it out teach you?
    Listen for
    Choices made on evidence.

  4. A number moved last quarter. What changed?

    Follow up with
    What would it have been if you had changed nothing?
    Listen for
    Whether they know what caused it.

  5. How big is the market, built from the bottom up?

    Follow up with
    Which assumption would you most like to test?
    Listen for
    Arithmetic they can say aloud.

  6. What is different about this, and why now?

    Follow up with
    What would a well-funded competitor do first?
    Listen for
    A real change in the world and a real answer to it.

  7. Who does what on the team, and who is missing?

    Follow up with
    What have you not hired for yet, and why?
    Listen for
    Honesty about gaps.

  8. What would you do with the first six months of the programme?

    Follow up with
    What would tell you it was going wrong?
    Listen for
    A plan with a stop condition.

Give every founder the same opening questions so partners can compare them.

How does Tracy run a founder interview from your form?

You put one link in your application form. A founder opens it in a browser, with no account, at any hour, and is told on the join screen that the conversation is recorded and transcribed. Tracy asks your questions, or questions she drafted from your description of what you want to learn, which you edit freely. She follows up on what the founder said and gives them room to describe what they are building and where they want to take it. Your form stays as it is, and you add the link, as the product page shows.

Recreated Tracy application page: a founder recording beside Tracy's question on trial sign-ups and a short form.
Tracy runs the first conversation from the application page, so every founder is asked about their company before a partner reads the form. Illustration with sample data

A founder pitches to Tracy from the application page, and she asks about what they said.

A worked example: one churn question and its follow-up

This is an illustration with sample data. The founder and company are fictional.

Tracy: What did the last customer who left tell you?

Founder (fictional): Setup took them a week. We cut it to a day.

Tracy: How many of the customers who left had that same week of setup?

Founder: Four of the seven who left. The other three left for price.

The sample assessment reads: "Gave a cause and a count: four of seven left over a week of setup, three over price. Had cut setup to a day."

Tracy asks what the last customer who left said, then asks how many customers left for that reason.
Tracy follows up on a churn answer by asking for a count. Illustration with sample data

The follow-up turns a story about churn into a count the partner can weigh.

What did the VC change?

Before Tracy, the VC held a 30-minute Zoom interview with every founder, sometimes eight back to back in a day. The director says Tracy "asks meaningful, investment-relevant questions and follows up on important points", and advises teams to "spend time designing the depth and structure of your interview questions during the initial setup." The question table above is a place to start.

What does the partner read afterwards?

For each founder, the partner gets a recording of both sides and a timestamped transcript, a written assessment for each question with its reasoning (scored on the criteria you set), and a ranking against the other founders, with strong ones flagged automatically. One record can go to an investment committee by link or PDF. A person decides who moves on and can override a rejection, move a founder forward or invite a founder to interview again. See AI interview reports.

Will founders find an AI interview impersonal?

Some partners say founders should be met by a person, and they are right about the second round. Tracy is the first conversation for everyone, so partners spend their hours on the best founders. Candidates rate Tracy 92 on NPS. Test the feel with your own cohort before you roll it out.

How to pilot a founder interview on one cohort

Pilot it on one cohort. Run one application window with one partner as owner and set the stop condition first.

  1. Put the link in your form for one track and load six to eight questions.
  2. Have the owner read the reports for a sample of founders and compare them with who the partners would have picked from the form alone.
  3. Stop if the owner would not change the shortlist after five reports.
  4. Measure founders who finished, partner minutes per applicant and founders no partner would have met.

Tracy costs $1 per credit, one credit per started 20 minutes, so 100 interviews of 20 minutes cost $100. The first 3 results are free with no card, there are no seats and a session with no answers is never charged. Try one on the Connect page, and see pricing.

Which path fits you:

Common questions

What is a founder interview?
A conversation in which a programme or investor learns what a company does, who pays, how the founders think and why now. Programmes such as Y Combinator hold a 10-minute one after the application. Tracy AI Interviewer runs that first conversation for every applicant.
What are good founder interview questions?
Ask about the customer, what customers who left said, what changed in the numbers, how the market is sized and why now. Follow each answer with a question that asks for a count or an example.
Can an AI interviewer run a first call with founders?
Yes. Tracy asks your questions, follows up on what the founder says and leaves partners a recording, a timestamped transcript and a written assessment per question. A partner decides.

Try Tracy on your next role

Tracy interviews every applicant, asks follow-up questions and sends you a ranked shortlist.

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