Why Agnes Aistleitner trusts founders’ discipline more than genius

The first thing you notice about Agnes Aistleitner, a partner at Africa-focused venture capital firm First Circle Capital, is that she answers questions as though she has been thinking about them for years. Her opinions are tempered by the time she has spent listening to founders, watching businesses succeed and fail, and learning which assumptions hold up in reality.

We meet at Artcaffé in Village Market, inside Nairobi’s diplomatic zone, where aid workers, diplomats, founders, and investors walk in and out of meetings that may, or may not, change the future.

Aistleitner speaks directly, laughs easily, and answers questions without the fog that clouds VC. An Austrian by birth, she now divides her life between Nairobi and Kampala, searching for founders worth backing and convincing investors to place bigger bets on Africa.

Before we begin the interview proper, we spend several minutes catching up on the sluggish investment climate, the difficulty of raising money in today’s market, why elections always make capital nervous, and whether Kenya’s politics this time will once again freeze decisions.

She orders hibiscus tea with samosas. I settle for hot chocolate and a croissant. Then she glances at her watch.

“I try not to eat after four,” she says, before breaking into a laugh that suggests the rule is occasionally negotiable. The coincidence catches me off guard. It is a discipline I have also been trying to cultivate—sometimes successfully, often not.

For someone who spends her days deciding which founders deserve funding, Aistleitner speaks remarkably little about money. She talks about discipline, learning, persistence, and showing up when companies are failing rather than disappearing.

Our conversation begins where all interesting journeys do, not her career, but with home.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You grew up in Austria and built a career that eventually brought you to East Africa. What part of the world did you discover in Nairobi and Kampala that you couldn’t find back home?

I’ve been in many countries—Jordan, Ukraine, Japan— and I felt like I wanted to spend some time here and see what’s going on on the continent. What I found in Kampala and Nairobi was a kind of rawness and possibility that is harder to find in Austria. Austria is great. It is beautiful, stable, organised, with a very high quality of life. But because so many systems already work, there is less space to feel that you can build something from scratch and have it matter. In East Africa, the gaps are visible. That can be frustrating, but it is also energising. You see problems everywhere, but you also see people building around them, through them, despite them. I guess you can ascribe this to youthful curiosity; Uganda and Kenya are great, and Austria is great.

When you visit Austria now, what feels foreign to you? And when you return to East Africa, what reminds you that you are still an outsider?

When I go back to Austria, what feels foreign is how structured and predictable everything is. I appreciate it more now than I did when I was younger, but it also feels a bit strange. There is a certain order to life, to careers, to institutions, to expectations.

Culturally, I’m so direct that people find me abrasive at times. East African culture reminds me a lot of Japan in weird ways. Communication is very indirect. And then, of course, I am a Muzungu (caucasian). That reminder follows you around whether you like it or not. It does not matter how long you have lived somewhere or how much you care about the place. You are still seen through a certain lens. I think the mature thing is not to be offended by that, but to understand it, keep learning, and not assume belonging is something you can simply declare for yourself.

What did your parents imagine you would become when you were young, and how different is that life from the one you ended up living?

Well, I come from a very simple background, grew up on a farm, my father is a roofer and mechanic, and I didn’t really meet my parents’ expectations for life. I’d be sitting as a hairdresser, admin, or office worker somewhere near my hometown. But it’s okay. What I did get from that background was very valuable. I learned how to work hard early. I learned that nobody is coming to save you. I learned that if something needs to get done, you do it. And I learned not to look too much for validation from other people, because when you come from a background where your ambitions do not make sense to the people around you, you either stop or you build the internal muscle to keep going.

You spend your days evaluating founders. What is the most important quality you’ve seen in great entrepreneurs that never appears in a pitch deck?

It’s always about the ability to grow as a person, persistence, and that drive to learn and improve. Great entrepreneurs are learning machines, but they put in the work; you’ve got to put in the work. A lot of founders are smart. Many are charismatic. Some are very good at fundraising. But the ones who become truly great are the ones who keep improving. They become better managers, better sellers, better capital allocators, better communicators. They grow into the company before the company outgrows them.

And then there is persistence. Not motivational-poster persistence. Actual persistence. The kind where you wake up after something went badly, and you still do the next thing that needs doing.

Venture capital is often described as a business of conviction. Tell me about a moment when your conviction cost you something—money, reputation, or sleep.

I actually think “conviction” is sometimes the wrong way to frame venture capital. VC is a probability distribution business. You are looking for enough shots on target where the upside is large enough to carry the losses. The job is to find exceptional teams with strong execution ability, building something audacious enough that it could become very big and, yes, also fail.

If nothing ever costs you anything, you are probably not taking enough risk. But that does not mean you should romanticise suffering or bad outcomes.

When companies do not go well, it is painful. It is painful for the founders, and it is painful for us as investors. It creates more work, more difficult conversations, more sleepless nights, and sometimes you are trying everything to save something that cannot be saved. That is sad because there are real people involved, and everyone went in hoping for a good outcome.

The best you can do is handle it with effort, honesty, and clear communication. You show up. You try to help. You do not disappear when things become uncomfortable.