The Unwritten Audition: A Conversation with Dr. Susanna Kislenko

The first time I met Dr. Susanna Kislenko, I was working at the Creative Destruction Lab at Oxford. She was one of the observers at the sessions, the rooms where founders pitch to investors in a series of speed-date style meetings before a final deliberation on whether each company moves forward.

I don't remember much about the lunch conversations from those days. The sessions ran from early morning to late evening, and there was always something, a missing investor, a slide order wrong in one of the briefing rooms, a founder who couldn't find their room. I wasn't a founder, wasn't pitching anything, but I felt it too, that low-level hum of everything mattering too much, all at once. But I remember talking to Susanna about Founder's Syndrome. It was the first time I'd heard the term in two years of working in the startup world. She mentioned Elizabeth Holmes almost immediately, and I got it straight away. I'd already seen it in the wild. I just hadn't known it had a name.

The other reason that conversation stayed with me is what happened that same afternoon, during the deliberation session. A female founder building an AI company was given a thumbs down by several mentors, all men, because of her demeanour. Her product was strong. Her confidence wasn't, at least not in the way the room expected. Just as the discussion was moving on, a female investor intervened. She said she'd been working with the founder since the first session. She'd been turned down or ignored before, for reasons that had nothing to do with her product or her team. “She is super coachable,” the investor said. “Appearing confident in front of investors is something we can help her fix.”

She was right to intervene. I believed that then, and I still do. It's one of the stories I return to whenever the conversation turns to gender representation in venture capital. Without that investor in the room, the founder would have been passed over for mentorship she'd already earned.

But the word that's stayed with me, the one I keep turning over, is “fix.” Fix her for what, exactly? Fix her to fit a template that nobody ever formally agreed on, that most people in the room couldn't describe if you asked them to, but that everyone seemed to recognise when it walked in?

That's where our conversation starts this time. Susanna has spent years researching Founder's Syndrome, the point at which a founder's outsized influence stops driving a company forward and starts quietly dismantling it. Google it, and her work comes up in the first few results. But today we're here to talk about something adjacent. What happened at CDL was about the template: the unwritten audition every founder has to pass before anyone takes them seriously. What I wanted to talk to Susanna about was what comes after, the pedestal that gets built around the founders who pass, and what it does to everyone in the room once it's there.

We started, as many conversations about founder culture eventually do, with The Bear.

If you haven't watched it: The Bear is an FX series set in a Chicago restaurant kitchen, built almost entirely out of controlled chaos. The head chef screams. The staff absorbs it. Everyone operates at the pitch of a near-emergency, all the time. I watched the first season and had to stop, it gave me genuine anxiety on top of an already anxious day job. Susanna laughed when I told her that. “It gives everyone anxiety,” she said. “That's the point.”

What the show gets at, she argues, goes beyond the restaurant world. It's the logic of urgency running through almost every lean, high-growth startup, the sense that everything is on fire, that the deadline was yesterday, that there's an enemy closing in. That logic serves a function.

The urgency doesn't have to be manufactured consciously. In many cases, the founder genuinely believes it. The effect is the same either way.

The real-world parallel she points to is René Redzepi, the chef behind Noma, for years ranked the best restaurant in the world, and recently the subject of a reckoning over the working conditions that produced that ranking. The question she keeps asking about Noma, and about the startups that run on the same logic, is a chicken-and-egg one: does that level of achievement actually require that environment? Or is the environment just what people tell themselves to justify it after the fact?

The founder template, as Susanna describes it, isn't a formal document. But spend enough time in accelerator rooms, pitch competitions, or investor meetings, and you start to feel its edges. Confidence that reads as certainty. Urgency that reads as vision. A particular kind of presence, commanding, unflappable, slightly larger than the room, that makes people believe you're the right person to bet on.

Elizabeth Holmes didn't stumble onto that template. She studied it. Specifically, she studied Steve Jobs, the black turtleneck, the reality distortion field, the biographical myth of the singular genius who sees what everyone else can't. Jobs is, Susanna notes, almost always the reference point.

What interests Susanna is the earlier question: what made the template so easy to inhabit? Holmes was nineteen when she founded Theranos. Susanna doesn't think she walked in with a fully formed plan to deceive anyone. She thinks the environment met certain traits Holmes already had and fed them, slowly and then all at once, until the performance became the person.

That's the point where the template and the pedestal become the same problem. The template gets you in the room. The pedestal makes it so nobody in the room can tell you you're wrong. Susanna interviewed board members and founders for a study a couple of years ago, asking both sides what happened when they disagreed.

The most telling signal wasn't conflict. It was the absence of it.

Theranos had a board member who did push back, someone who had worked at Apple, who saw the problems early and said so. Holmes made him leave. That's how the pedestal works: it doesn't prevent dissent so much as it makes dissent unsustainable. You can say the thing once. You probably won't be there to say it twice.

Holmes is an extreme case, but an instructive one. She's a woman who didn't adapt the template, she disappeared into it. Susanna argues this is the trap that keeps recurring for female founders. The template doesn't exclude them outright. It just has one way in.

She's been watching this play out on screen recently. Serena Williams produced a reality series called The CEO Club, built around female founders. “I really wanted to see alternative models,” Susanna says. What she saw instead was a lot of girlbossing, female leaders performing toughness, performing authority, performing the unflappable certainty the template demands. Different casting, same script.

The counter-example she reaches for is unexpected. Not a founder, not an investor, Amy Winehouse.^[1] There's an early talk show interview, Susanna says, where the host asks Winehouse whether the music industry tried to change her image when she first came up, during the peak Britney Spears era of manufactured pop. Winehouse's answer: they couldn't, because she already knew who she was. “She came in with her stuff figured out,” Susanna says. “She wasn't a blank slate.”

The template couldn't find a way in. That kind of groundedness is, Susanna thinks, the strongest protection any founder has, regardless of gender or background. The problem is you can't manufacture it. You either have it going in, or the environment gets there first.

Susanna has been running retreats (Queen Bee Retreats) for women in leadership for seven years, the whole premise of which is to create enough distance from the day-to-day that people can actually examine the models being handed to them. In those settings, she says, something different tends to emerge, more collaborative, more community-focused.

The outside world, of course, is still largely run by the template. And the template, as Susanna is careful to point out, isn't just a cultural habit, it's structurally reinforced at the funding level. The richest people in the world right now are, with very few exceptions, white men who made their money in tech. They fund what they recognise. And they recognise what they are.

Changing that requires something more specific than putting more diverse voices in investor seats, though that matters too. It requires those people to already have enough of a track record within the existing system to be taken seriously when they push against it. Susanna points to Reese Witherspoon, who built a production company to fund complex female-led stories, from deep enough inside Hollywood that nobody could dismiss her.

The question she's sitting with now, the one she's about to start a formal study on, is whether Founder's Syndrome looks different in women than in men. Her instinct is yes. It's not that women are less susceptible. It's that their version of it may be harder to see. It doesn't always look like dominance. Sometimes it looks like performance. Sometimes it looks like survival.

But the study she's most animated about is the investor side. Who sits on the other side of the table, what they're trained to see, and whether the template is being reproduced or quietly rewritten every time a different kind of person makes a funding decision. I think back to that room at CDL, the investor who intervened, who saw what the others had missed. One person, one moment. Susanna would probably say that's where it starts.

The template doesn't change in a press release. It changes when someone who survived the game decides to rewrite the rules.

This article was written by Nessie Chu-Heng Lu, Strategic Marketing Lead, Founders & Funders.