When assessing talent, the “why” matters much more than the “what”. The signal you get from understanding why someone chose a particular city, major, college, or company is orders of magnitude larger than simply knowing what they chose.
Specially when looking at someone early in their career, that still doesn't have that many data points. Which is the exact people startups (and VCs) should be looking for, undiscovered talent. People that have high potential but haven't been priced in yet.
Graham Duncan in “What is going on here, with this human?” says that the job when assessing someone is to really understand what is going on with this person, their intrinsic motivations and capabilities - hence the title. That’s the real question, and you start getting glimpses of that the more “whys” you answer about someone’s life.
Take, Roelof Botha, Partner at Sequoia. He studied Actuarial Science in college, but not because of the subject itself. The deeper reason was that, at the time, it was unclear if South Africa (where he was born) would have a peaceful transition to democracy, and history suggested it wouldn’t. So, when choosing a major he looked for one that would allow him to work and live abroad — Actuarial Science fit the bill. Now, this is a very powerful signal. You can get a sense of risk taking (wanting to live abroad alone), ambition, and that he is calculated, all great traits. Plus, given how difficult that degree is, it also speaks to intelligence and hard work. All of these signals come from a single transition period in his life. Then consider his next move: joining McKinsey. This normally isn’t the greatest signal when looking for a great entrepreneur — it’s often a stable, low-risk path. But again, the real signal is in why he chose it. At the time, McKinsey had just opened its first office in South Africa, and joining the firm would give him the international opportunities he had been looking for — working with people people from all over the world and potentially joining an office abroad. By understanding this you would have more confidence that the early signals you found were actually real and not a fluke and discovered a new important one: determination.
So, when assessing someone—whether as a potential hire or the right founder to invest in—go over their entire life and cover the most important moments, the experiences that define them, which in many cases are periods of transition, and look for signals of the traits you believe are most important.
After that the only "what" that really matters is: "What was the most difficult problem you've faced and how did you solve it".