Why C2FM exists

I used to run a company called BCase. It was a birth control pill case that attached to your phone so your pills and your alarms were always in the same place. I took it from idea to production and sold a few hundred units. I still have about 200 of them in a box in my parents’ garage.

BCase failed for a few reasons. One of the big ones was that my co-founder and I were misaligned.

I want to be clear that I’m not salty about it! That stuff happens constantly and it happened to us. What I took from it is that someone can look perfect on paper and be sitting right next to you, and that is still not a no-brainer. You have to go deeper than chance and surface-level indicators. You have to actually align on values, vision, and non-negotiables. We never did, and it caught up with us.

After BCase I spent four years in early-stage VC across climate, deep tech, and industrials. I’ve reviewed close to 4,000 decks and done over 1,000 founder calls at TechNexus Venture Collaborative and Newlab. For two years I ran membership screening at Newlab, so I was the person deciding whether we took a first call or not. That’s where I got good at reading an application, a LinkedIn, and a first conversation for fit rather than for credentials.

And I kept watching my own mistake play out in other people’s companies! Two smart people who happened to be in the same room, who never had the uncomfortable conversations early, falling apart later over something they could have surfaced on day one.

So I started writing it all down. Every pattern I recognized across those founder conversations plus my own experience became a list of the attributes that actually matter, with weights for how much each one counts.

Then I started running events and did all the matching by hand anyway. The more people I sat across from, the better my questions got. Eventually the two things merged. The algorithm behind C2FM is that list, and it gets sharper every time I use it.

It still only gets me about 80% of the way there. I tweak the last 20% myself and write down why I changed it, because that’s how it improves.

Three things I believe, which is why C2FM works the way it does:

1. Directories don’t work. People scroll once, decide they’ve seen it all, and never come back. You end up reading every book by its cover, and the person without the flashy job is very often exactly who you should be building with.
2. This has to happen in person. You cannot vibe check someone over video. Digital-only matching fizzles, or you find out the person who said they were in SF is actually in Montana. That’s why we’re NYC only.
3. I read every single application myself. Not to keep people out! It only works if everyone in the room is serious about the same thing. That caps how big this gets and I’m completely fine with that.

I built the platform I needed five years ago. If you’re looking for the person you can build with, come find us.

Sammie