First Intent Cannot Be Taught, So It Ranks First

Near the end of an interview people often ask us one question: what do you actually look at?

Our position first. Degrees, rank, year of entry — none of them need to be asked. Only one thing has to be asked: first intent. Why? Because everything else can be filled in.

Ability does not even come second

Is there a gap in ability between colleagues? There is. But it is not as wide as people outside imagine. Method can be distilled from the strongest person near you; taste is ground out one transaction at a time. Both can be taught. First intent cannot.

A mandate runs sixty days across eight milestones, a little over two months. The hardest part is usually the middle: market expectations are not calibrated yet and the lead investor is not settled. Who will make one more round of calls then? That has nothing to do with craft. First intent is simply motive. The line in the Archive — PM looks like a capability, it is actually a temperament — is about exactly this. That is where the gap is.

No pedigree test has another side: do the work, take the reward. Rank counts only when rank represents contribution. In a project-based firm, a young colleague may well have carried the lead on a mandate. Then it is counted as carried.

If the intent is sound, the mistake is not charged to him

So we say it in full: where the intent is sound, act boldly, and the mistakes along the way are carried by the organisation. The second half is a promise, not a figure of speech. If a judgement is wrong, the review is the review. The account is not charged to a person.

Why are we willing to underwrite that? Because the reverse is more expensive. In an organisation that assigns blame afterwards, people only make safe moves: no positions taken, no lines crossed, no names on anything. Twenty to thirty mandates a year, half of them repeat mandates — the same people willing to hand you the next round — a book like that cannot survive everyone protecting himself. Intent that is crooked is the real problem. That kind of mistake the organisation cannot carry.

Someone who dares to disagree usually has clean intent

Sound intent has one more sign that is rarely spelt out. It is daring to object in a meeting.

The council of elders plainly means this: no administrative posts, and professional standing left to settle naturally. What elders have in common is a habit of thinking from the long-term view of the organisation, and saying the thing when it needs saying. He wants the thing to be right, not himself.

This is also the ground under "no internal friction." A boutique team has no process slack to absorb friction, so a little factionalism converts straight into project losses. But the other way round, when everyone is watching how well the thing is finished, borrowing people across projects costs almost nothing. That part is hard to copy. It was not designed. It came from screening people over a long time.

The boundary should be stated too: there is no fast way to read intent. What works is plain — talk several times, watch what he does on small things with no reward, then see whether he is willing to sit on the bench with a company. As far as we can tell, that is more accurate than any questionnaire. Of course, reading people has never had a perfect ruler.

The last line of our recruiting notice is one sentence: bring your first intent. We also believe the old eight-character line: right heart, right thoughts, and every blessing arrives.