- What do VCs look for in startup founders?
- For Arielle Zuckerberg at least, it boils down to a balance of what she calls “rizz and tiz.”
- Zuckerberg, a general partner at Long Journey Ventures and sister of Mark Zuckerberg, explained her theory on a podcast.
“Rizz” will open doors for you, especially if you’re a founder, says Arielle Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg, a general partner at Long Journey Ventures and sister of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, recently talked about what her early-stage VC firm looks for in founders.
It boils down, she said, to what she calls “rizz and tiz.”
“This is kind of how we think about evaluating founders at Long Journey,” she said on an episode of the podcast “Sourcery” released last week. “In our investment committee meetings, we talk about whether or not this founder has the right balance of rizz and tiz.”
Rizz entered the online lexicon in recent years and is short for charisma.
To Zuckerberg and Long Journey, this means knowing “Can this person recruit an amazing team, can they attract downstream funding, are they going to be a magnetic leader?” she said.
As for “tiz,” it appears to be Zuckerberg’s riff on “tism,” an abbreviation for those on the autism spectrum that has itself become internet slang. She spoke about supporting neurodiverse founders at Long Journey.
“We believe that neurodivergence is a superpower, and we look for people that live their lives differently,” she said. “I think it also represents an intensity and directness. So we want the balance of both, and we think it kind of takes both to be an amazing founder.”
Zuckerberg gave some examples of founders her firm has backed who demonstrate rizz and tiz. One founder, she said, “doesn’t believe in smartphones,” so he uses a flip phone and a disposable camera. Another, she said, uses “special focus glasses” with slits such that he can only see his computer through them.
At the end of the day, rizz and tiz is really about “people who are living their lives differently but those people are also incredibly magnetic,” she said. These people also “have the boldness to go after a really magically weird idea,” she added.
On its website, Long Journey calls itself “believers in the magically weird.”
“‘Chase the magically weird’ pushes us to do things that take guts, focus on finding outliers, question the status quo, and let our freak flags fly,” it says on its values page. “We love unconventional ideas, quirky personalities, bold choices, and things other people describe as ridiculous or stupid.”
“If you’re a weirdo and/or you’re building something crazy, we’d love to chat!” the page says.
Cyan Banister, one of the firm’s co-founders, told Bloomberg that Long Journey aims to “look for those magically weird people and to find them before it becomes consensus.”
“There’s always a pocket of dreamers and weirdos. You just have to know where to look,” Banister said.
Long Journey and Zuckerberg did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Other VCs see merit in Zuckerberg’s theory too.
“Tiz is autism. Like you need to be a little bit autistic about the topic or area you’re in,” former Facebook VP Sam Lessin recently said on the podcast “This Week in Startups.”
“Rizz gets you in the door; Tiz keeps you there,” Morgan Polotan, partner at Monashee Investment Management, wrote in a post on Threads.
While hosting “SNL” in 2021, Elon Musk said he has Asperger’s, an autism spectrum disorder.
Musk joked in his opening monologue that he’s going to “make a lot of eye contact with the cast” and was well-versed in “running ‘human’ in emulation mode.”
