If a VC wrote a brutally honest memo on your startup today, would you actually want to read it?
Hey Guys,
I’ve been in VC for about ten years now, and there’s a pattern that keeps repeating: most startups don’t fail because the founders are lazy or dumb (most of the time), they fail because they don’t understand VC math or VC expectations. If you don’t understand how a fund thinks about scalability, return profiles, and portfolio construction, you can’t really tell a story that lands with investors, and often, you’re not even building toward the kind of scalability they need.
I’ve rejected a ridiculous number of startups purely because of this gap. On the flip side, I’ve mentored hundreds of founders in accelerators and incubators, and I always end up teaching the same thing: how to define and narrate scalability, how to adjust pricing, how to deepen the business model so that – at least on paper – it fits the logic a VC is actually underwriting. How you should aim at 100 mln ARR within a fund's lifecycle to be a fund returner etc ...
What makes this more painful is that, inside funds, we write detailed investment memos on the “almost” cases, the ones that were close but still no. Those memos break down the company exactly the way we see it: risks, gaps, upside, what would need to be true for it to work. If founders could read those, the learning would be insane. But they never see them.
So I built a platform that basically does that from the inside out: founders answer a structured set of questions, and the platform audits their startup the way a VC would. I'd leverage loads of ressources and data i have collected over the years to strenghten the case. All the tralala of decent prompting, and solid/unique data assets
Founders get the kind of feedback they’d normally never receive: what doesn’t add up, what’s attractive, what’s just noise, what they need to fix or clarify before talking to investors. They can then use that to refine their story, rebuild their pitch, and generally stop wasting investor conversations.
I believe that most cases can be turned into relevant VC cases if heads are scratched enough. And i feel the tools that I built are kinda spot on.
Here’s the problem: most founders don’t see the value of this upfront. They’re obsessed with “access”, they just want intros, meetings, a list of VC emails. When I tested this by plugging my own VC network into the platform, suddenly demand went up: people want to buy the access, not the understanding. My mission, educating founders to actually think like investors so they can win them, gets overshadowed by the simple “here’s a network” value prop.
It’s like founders are misunderstanding the problem. I’m a VC, I get that what people want doesn’t always line up with what they need, and demand rarely prioritises the deeper, more important work. But I feel it could be so much more helpful.
I’m trying to reconcile this. How would you think about it? How do I keep the core educational piece as the main mission, while accepting that “access to investors” is what founders respond to first? Any thoughts on how to design or position this so that the education isn’t just a nice-to-have wrapper around a glorified investor list?
Also, if you are a founder, early stage, what are the painpoints, an investor can help you solve? As in what can i add to the platform so you'd get even more value ?
