What a startup founder actually reads on your CV

What does a founder look at first?

Whether anything on the page stands out. Credentials get skimmed, evidence gets read.

A degree from a well-known university is nice and it takes about two seconds to register. Then the question underneath it is immediate: what did you do that was not assigned to you?

Same for a big company on the CV. Working at a large tech company is a real signal and it is also shared with thousands of other applicants. It tells a founder you can pass an interview at a big company. It does not tell them what you will do in a room with four people and no instructions.

Do side projects matter more than a degree?

At an early-stage company, usually yes.

A product you built and took from nothing to a thousand users, that made some money, is a more interesting line than almost any credential. It demonstrates the exact thing being hired for: that you can start something without anyone telling you to, and finish enough of it that strangers used it.

This is the biggest single difference from corporate hiring, where a side project reads as a hobby and the credential carries the weight. Here it is the other way round.

What counts as evidence in your role?

Anything you built or grew yourself, with a number attached.

• Engineering and product: something you shipped, a product taken from zero to one, a portfolio, websites built for real clients, an agency you ran
• Go-to-market, sales and growth: an account you grew, content that got real reach, an agency (you had to sell to run it), anything where you can point to a number you moved
• Any role: a project that existed because you decided it should

An agency is a strong line for either side. It means you sold something to someone who paid, which is rarer than it sounds and is most of what a startup needs.

Does it count if the project had nothing to do with startups?

Yes. What is being read is how you think, not what the subject was.

An Instagram or TikTok account you grew to ten thousand followers counts, and it does not matter that the niche was hiking. A YouTube channel you ran as a teenager counts. A photography album counts. Blogging counts.

None of these are impressive because of the topic. They are impressive because most applicants have nothing at all outside their job history, and anyone who built an audience around something they cared about has already shown they can start a thing and keep going with it.

How should the lines on the page be written?

Did X, which resulted in Y, with a number wherever you have one.

That is the whole structure and it is the one piece of generic CV advice worth repeating here, because the number is what survives a thirty-second skim. New revenue, customers signed, churn reduced, users acquired, a percentage, a growth rate.

If you do not have numbers for something, say what changed because of you. A responsibility with no outcome attached reads as a job description rather than an achievement.

Do cover letters matter?

They can, if they are short. A full page does not get read.

Ten sentences is plenty. The length most people write, a dense A4 page, is not skimmed and then judged, it is not read at all.

The useful version does one job: says why this company specifically, in a way that could not have been sent to anyone else.

Can a founder tell when an application is AI-written?

Often, yes, and it is usually the end of that application.

The tells are consistent. Nothing specific about the company. Words like resonates, vision and mission doing the work that facts should be doing. Long sentences with em dashes in them, a rhythm that reads smooth and says nothing.

Using a model to tighten your writing is fine and most people do it. Sending something you have not reworded is not, because the founder is not reading it for the prose. They are reading it for evidence that you thought about them specifically, and that is exactly the part a model cannot invent for you.