We get sent a lot of decks (around 2,000 last year) and we meet a lot of founders. And within the first few minutes of a conversation, something separates the ones who are building because they spotted a market opportunity from the ones who simply cannot stop thinking about this problem.

The latter are the ones we back.

Obsession isn't the same as passion. Passion can be performative, can be borrowed, can fade the moment the market turns or the team hits a rough patch. Obsession is something else. It's the founder who knows their customer's problem at a granular, almost uncomfortably intimate level. It's the one who sends you a voice note at 11pm not because they're trying to impress you, but because they just figured something out and needed to tell someone. It's the person who, when you push back hard in diligence, doesn't fold or get defensive. Instead they come back sharper, better, with evidence you hadn't considered.

That's what obsession looks like in practice.

Building a company is not a rational thing to do. The odds are brutal, the hours are relentless, and the moments when the rational choice would be to stop are many. What carries founders through those moments isn't strategy - it's the deep, almost irrational conviction that this thing has to exist.

As investors, we can help with a lot. We can open doors, provide capital, share experience, make introductions, help think through hard decisions. But we cannot manufacture that core conviction. We cannot install obsession in someone who doesn't already have it. And when it isn't there, we tend to find out in the hardest possible way, usually at exactly the wrong moment in the company's trajectory.

So when we look at a founding team, we're asking: when everything goes sideways (and it will), what keeps these people in the room? What makes them the ones who will solve this problem and no one else? Why them, why now, why this?

The answer, every time, has to have obsession at its heart.

Our second company value is Obsession for a reason. We don't just want to see it in the founders we back, we hold ourselves to the same standard too.

That means going deep. Not skimming the surface of a sector and forming a view, but genuinely understanding the technology, the market dynamics, the regulatory landscape, the competitive pressures, the unit economics. It means caring about the detail in a way that makes us genuinely useful to the founders who trust us - not just as a source of capital, but as partners who've done the work.

It means being data-driven and staying AI-native in how we operate, because we believe the same tools reshaping the companies we back should be reshaping how we run our firm. It means holding ourselves accountable to the highest standards in how we manage capital, how we report, how we serve our investors.

Obsession, for us, is the refusal to be merely fine. It's the commitment to being excellent, even when, especially when, no one is checking.

Ten years in, the pattern is clear. The companies in our portfolio that have grown the fastest, attracted the best talent, raised follow-on rounds from the best investors: they are, almost without exception, the ones founded by people who were obsessed before we ever met them.

Obsession is what gives founders the endurance to outlast their competitors. It's what makes them magnetic to talent. People want to work for someone who genuinely, deeply believes in what they're building. It's what makes them credible to customers, because customers can sense when someone truly understands their world.

And it's contagious. The obsessive founders build obsessive teams. The obsessive teams build products that obsessive customers tell their friends about.

That flywheel starts with a founding team who couldn't let it go.

My brother ended his piece with a question for founders considering the leap: What's stopping you?

Mine is slightly different, and it's for founders who've already leapt:

Are you obsessed with the right thing?

Not obsessed with fundraising, or with the narrative, or with the milestones that make for a good investor update. Obsessed with the problem: understanding it more deeply than anyone else, with solving it better than it's ever been solved before (normally 10x better), with building a company that exists to change something real.

That's the obsession we're looking for. And when we find it, we back it - with everything we have!

Love Ventures backs ambitious founders building technologies that drive productivity across the UK. Our four values — Longevity, Obsession, Vocal, Expertise — shape everything we do. If you're building something you're obsessed with, we'd love to hear from you: founders@loveventures.co.uk