FoundersEdge Venture Capital

What Do You Tell Investors When Things Aren’t Going Well?

2026-09-08T00:00:00-04:00

The short version

The updates you least want to send are the ones that matter most. When revenue is flat, a deal slips, or a cofounder leaves, keep your normal cadence. Lead with the bad news, keep reporting the same KPIs, separate what happened from why you think it happened, and end with a specific ask. A simple structure covers it: facts → context/assessment → what you’re doing or don’t know → ask. If you can’t face writing even that, send five sentences — that still beats disappearing for three months.

It’s easy to send investor updates when revenue is growing and things are going well. It’s a lot harder when revenue is flat, the deals you thought would close didn’t, your cofounder is leaving, or you’re starting to wonder whether what you’re building is working.

Those may be the most important updates you send.

I’m writing this specifically for early-stage founders — particularly pre-seed and seed — where investors bet on you as a person and are often close enough to the business to be genuinely useful.

I’ve been on both sides. As a founder, I know how uncomfortable it can be to tell the people who backed you that things aren’t going according to plan. And as an investor, I also know how frustrating it is to not get updates, or to get an update saying it’s over — without the chance to help.

Four Reasons to Send the Update Anyway

When things aren’t going well, it’s tempting to wait.

I’ll send the update when this deal closes. I’ll wait until I figure out what we’re doing. Maybe next month the numbers will look better…

And suddenly you haven’t sent an update in three months.

Keep your normal cadence — even if the update is uncomfortable. Here’s why.

1. Your investors might actually be able to help

They may be able to make an introduction, share a pattern they’ve seen elsewhere, help with your next round, or just think through a problem with you. And even if they couldn’t have helped, most would rather have been given the chance.

2. Consistency builds trust

When I took investors’ money as a founder, I felt a responsibility to keep them informed regardless of what was happening. I ask the same of founders I invest in. You build trust by being consistent, in good news and bad. And you earn a ton of respect when you share what isn’t working.

3. Your investors are learning through you

Venture investing means knowing some investments won’t work. If an investor is going to lose money, they at least want the chance to understand why. What did you learn about the customer? The sales motion? Hiring? Product? What worked that another founder could use?

Those lessons make your investors better at their job and better at supporting other founders. When you disappear, you take that value away too.

4. It raises your odds of success

Your update is a mirror, and it holds you accountable. Writing it forces you to say: revenue didn’t grow, customer count stayed the same, the five deals we thought would close didn’t. It’s uncomfortable to write those things down. But holding the mirror up to yourself — or letting your investors hold it up for you — is critical if you want the business to work.

Sometimes an investor will ask the question you’ve been avoiding, or see a pattern that’s harder to recognize when you’re in it every day.

Being transparent isn’t only the right thing to do for your investors. It may be one of the best things you can do for yourself.

So What Do You Actually Say?

Start with the facts.

Don’t hide the bad number. Don’t replace the KPI you normally report with a new one that looks better. Don’t make your investor read six paragraphs to figure out that revenue didn’t move.

Then add context, your next step, and any asks you have. A simple framework:

Facts → Context/assessment → What you’re doing or don’t know → Ask

For example:

Revenue and customer count were flat this month. Two prospects we expected to close chose a competitor. I’m concerned our competitive positioning isn’t landing late in the sales process. If you’ve sold into a market with an established incumbent, I’d love to talk through our positioning and sales process.

It’s okay to say you don’t know. Naming something that isn’t working — or that you don’t understand — and asking for help gives your investors a real opportunity to be useful.

Our free investor-update skill drafts exactly this structure — TL;DR, metrics, highlights, lowlights, asks, and runway — in your own voice, for the good months and the hard ones.

10 Rules for Investor Updates When Things Aren’t Going Well

1. Keep the cadence

If you normally send monthly updates, keep sending them monthly.

2. Put the bad news up top

Don’t make investors hunt for it. “Tough month. Revenue was flat and we lost our largest customer. Here’s what happened and what we’re doing.”

3. Keep reporting the same KPIs

If you always report MRR, report MRR when it’s down. Don’t suddenly replace it with “pipeline opportunities.” Don’t change the scoreboard because you’re losing.

4. Separate facts from your assessment

What happened? Why do you think it happened? Be clear about the difference.

5. Tell us what you’re doing next

What are you changing, testing, stopping, or prioritizing as a result?

6. Say “I don’t know” when that’s the case

You don’t need to manufacture an answer because you think your investors expect you to have one.

7. Make specific asks

Not: “Any ideas appreciated!” Instead: “We’re getting ghosted after second sales calls. If you have experience strengthening enterprise sales processes, I’d love to book a meeting next week.”

What assumption was wrong? What would you do differently knowing what you know now?

9. If something is material, don’t wait for the next update

Your biggest customer churned. Your cofounder is leaving. Your runway changed materially. You may need to shut down if you can’t raise.

Pick up the phone or send an individual note. Share your calendar. Your investors invested because they want to be involved and support you. There’s nothing to hide.

10. When you really don’t want to write it, send the minimum viable version

Revenue / customer count: [X]
Biggest challenge: [X]
What happened: [X]
What we’re doing: [X]
Where I could use help: [X]

Five sentences beats disappearing for three months.

For the broader mechanics and templates I recommend for regular updates, see the Mastering Investor Updates playbook.

Yes, I’d Back a Founder Who Lost My Money

One founder I invested in has sent an update every month through slow sales growth, cofounder changes, and fundraising challenges.

When something material happened, they didn’t wait for the next update. When their cofounder left, they reached out individually. When they realized they might have to shut down if they couldn’t raise another round, they told us. They shared their calendar in case investors wanted more information, had ideas, or could help.

I’ve also watched them learn some hard lessons along the way: how difficult it is to manage a development team without a technical cofounder, the value that technical counterpart can bring, and one I think is especially important:

Identifying a real customer problem isn’t enough. It has to be one of their most important problems to get their attention, action, and budget.

I would invest in this founder again, even though I lost money on this company. I’ve watched them learn, pivot when things aren’t working, and make hard decisions. They’ve built trust with me throughout the process, and they’ll bring all of that into whatever they build next.

When the Updates Get Longer, Pay Attention

This is a pattern I’ve learned to watch.

Sometimes, as traction gets less clear, investor updates get longer. There’s more about the market, strategy, product development, exciting conversations, and pipeline — but it gets harder to answer some basic questions: Did revenue grow? Did you add customers? Are customers using the product? How much runway is left?

I invested in one founder who initially sent regular quarterly updates. As traction became less clear, the updates got longer. On the surface, they sounded exciting. In the details, it became increasingly difficult to understand what was actually happening. Then the updates stopped. A few quarters later, I reached out personally and learned the company was running low on cash and trying to raise another round. I only knew because I asked.

Clarity of thought drives clarity of action. Early-stage companies have very limited time and money. Progress requires focused, sometimes painful trade-offs. If you can’t clearly confront what’s happening, it becomes much harder to decide what needs to change.

And it makes me wonder: if you’re avoiding accountability with your investors, are you also avoiding difficult conversations with employees? Your cofounder? Yourself? This says more about how you operate as a founder than it might seem on the surface.

Think Beyond This Company

There are two types of founders I’m particularly likely to back again:

Founders who made me money.
Founders who communicated consistently and candidly throughout the journey, even if they lost my money.

Startups fail. Good founders can build companies that don’t work. The outcome of this company isn’t the only thing you’re building — you’re also building your reputation as a founder and your relationships with the people who backed you. The best founder-investor relationships can span multiple companies.

So when things aren’t going well, resist the instinct to put your head down, fix everything, and come back when you have good news. Tell us what’s actually happening. Let us help. And let us hold up the mirror so we can build a world-changing company together.

Connect with me on LinkedIn or reach out to FoundersEdge for more fundraising guidance.

Do Solo Founders Really Underperform?

2026-06-02T00:00:00-04:00

The short version

The claim that solo founders underperform is repeated as settled fact and isn’t. The research is genuinely mixed: some studies find team-founded startups raise more and survive longer; others find no reliable outcome gap once you control for the founder’s experience and the capital they can access. What consistently does predict failure isn’t being solo. It’s co-founder conflict. The useful question isn’t “solo or not,” it’s “does a second founder add a capability you can’t otherwise buy, without adding a fault line?”

There’s a whole body of lore around founders and co-founders. That you need one. How to find the right match. How to split the equity. When to walk away. “We’d want to see a co-founder” is one of the most confidently asserted rules in early-stage investing, and one of the most often repeated with no evidence attached. So we went looking for something more solid.

What the research says

The picture is a lot less tidy than the advice.

Team-founded startups tend to raise more early capital. One of the more replicated findings. But it measures funding, which is partly a mirror of investor preference, not an independent read on company quality.¹
Survival and growth effects are inconsistent. Across studies, once you control for prior experience and access to capital, the “solo penalty” shrinks and sometimes disappears. Roughly 1 in 5 billion-dollar startups were solo-founded, often by folks with stronger track records.^{2, 3}
Co-founder conflict is a top failure mode. The deepest research on founder dynamics, drawn from nearly ten thousand founders tracked over a decade, is blunt on one point: the breakdown of the relationship between co-founders is among the most common and most destructive early failures. That body of work, by Noam Wasserman, is where the warning actually comes from.⁴ A bad co-founder is worse than none.⁵

Here’s the honest version. Startups are hard, and they can be brutally lonely. The one thing every startup needs is the right combination of skills, and it’s genuinely rare to find all of them in a single person. That’s the real case for a co-founder. Not a box an investor wants ticked, a capability you’re actually missing.

The real variable

So the evidence points away from headcount and toward two things: complementarity and durability. A second founder helps when they add a capability the company actually needs and can’t easily hire for yet, and when the relationship can survive real stress.³

We’ve seen this up close, and it’s the part the spreadsheets miss. Deep co-founder trust is close to the whole game, precisely because relationship failure is so common. The pair who can be genuinely vulnerable with each other, and who bring truly complementary skills, has a huge advantage. Bolting on a co-founder to satisfy a pattern-matching investor, with someone you’ve never been through anything hard with, imports the exact risk the research keeps flagging.⁴

What we tell founders

When I started my own company, I started solo, then brought on co-founders because I needed the help. That’s not unusual, and it isn’t a weakness. Finding people whose skills complement yours lets you move faster, and I’m grateful I did.

But I also tell solo founders this: it’s not really about the title “co-founder.” Sometimes wanting to stay solo is a control question in disguise. What actually matters is having someone genuinely in it to win it with you, a founding engineer, an early teammate, a partner who owns the outcome the way you do. That commitment is the advantage, whatever you call it.

So if you’re solo and it’s working, “get a co-founder” is not a data-backed mandate. Solve for the missing capability and the missing conviction. Sometimes that’s a co-founder, sometimes a founding engineer, sometimes an advisor. And if you do bring someone on as a co-founder, spend more time on the equity split, the roles, and the vesting than on the pitch. That’s where the evidence says the outcome actually gets decided.^{4, 6}

References

Esen, T., Dahl, M. S., & Sorenson, O. (2023). Jockeys, Horses or Teams? The Selection of Startups by Venture Capitalists. Journal of Business Venturing Insights 19, e00383. Firms with more and better-educated founders are likelier to be funded, and larger, higher-quality teams raise more still. Author copy · ScienceDirect
Tamaseb, A. (2021). Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups. PublicAffairs. About 1 in 5 billion-dollar startups were solo-founded, often by founders with stronger track records. superfoundersbook.com
Eesley, C. E., Hsu, D. H., & Roberts, E. B. (2013). The Contingent Effects of Top Management Teams on Venture Performance. Strategic Management Journal 35(12), 1798-1817. A team’s effect on performance is contingent on strategy and environment, not a fixed headcount premium (2,067 firms). SSRN · SMJ
Wasserman, N. (2012). The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup. Princeton University Press. Co-founder relationship and equity decisions are among the most common and most destructive early failures; friend and family teams are less stable. Princeton University Press
De Wit, F. R. C., Greer, L. L., & Jehn, K. A. (2012). The Paradox of Intragroup Conflict: A Meta-Analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology 97(2), 360-390. Across 116 studies (n≈8,880 groups), relationship conflict is robustly negative for group performance and satisfaction. PubMed · APA
Hellmann, T. F., & Wasserman, N. (2011). The First Deal: The Division of Founder Equity in New Ventures. NBER WP 16922; Management Science 63(8), 2647-2666 (2017). Quick, equal “handshake” equity splits track avoided hard bargaining and lower valuations (1,476 founders). NBER · Management Science

Full source library for this brief: the Research Library.

Founder-Market Fit: Real Signal, or a Story We Tell Afterward?

2026-05-12T00:00:00-04:00

The short version

Founder-market fit is real but tricky. There’s decent evidence that founders with genuine domain experience do better on average. But the term also gets pinned on anyone who succeeded, which makes it feel more predictive than it really is. The version that holds up is specific and almost non-consensus: does this founder know something true about this market that most people don’t, and can they reach the right customers faster because of who they are? The version that doesn’t is vibes.

Investors love “founder-market fit” because it sounds like judgment instead of gambling. And sometimes it is. But a lot of the time it’s a story we write after the credits roll, then pretend we knew from the opening scene.

What has support

The predictive version is a non-consensus insight. Strip away the storytelling and the useful core of founder-market fit is simple: this founder knows something true about the market that most smart people don’t. Peter Thiel calls these secrets, and his famous test for one, what important truth do very few people agree with you on?, is really a founder-market-fit test in disguise.⁴ A founder running on a non-consensus insight can make moves that look wrong to everyone else, right up until they look obvious. The empirical version is softer but real: prior experience in the specific industry is one of the stronger predictors of building a top-growth company.¹
And you can build it on purpose. Fit isn’t only something you’re born into. Take Jeff Bezos. In 1994, studying the numbers at D.E. Shaw, he clocked the web growing at a rate he pegged near 2,300% a year, a genuinely non-consensus read on the internet at the time. Then he did the unglamorous half. He drove to Portland for a four-day American Booksellers Association course on how to actually run a bookstore, right down to the session on opening inventory.⁵ Amazon was born at the intersection of those two, a hard-won internet insight and a deliberately studied book market. Almost nobody had both. He went and got both.
Customer access is underrated, and it compounds. A big chunk of what people call founder-market fit is really the ability to reach the right customers, including the actual buyers, and get honest feedback fast. A founder who already knows the voice of the customer can tell real signal from politeness, land early pilots, and correct product direction before burning the runway proving the obvious. That access de-risks the most expensive part of the early company: working out what to build and who will pay for it. The frameworks that try to score fit treat this founder-customer dimension as a distinct, assessable thing, not a vibe.²

Where it breaks down

The biopic problem. Once a company wins, it’s trivial to cut the founder-market-fit narrative, and the ending always looks inevitable in hindsight. Every biopic makes the outcome feel preordained. That story wasn’t necessarily predictive at the time. It got assembled afterward. Worth remembering: across 200-plus billion-dollar startups, only about 30% of founders had directly relevant industry experience, so “fit” was neither the norm nor a precondition for the winners.³
It can hide its own absence. “Passion for the space” gets mistaken for fit constantly. Here’s the difference: enthusiasm is not insight, and it’s definitely not access.

How to use it

Turn it into a testable question instead of a feeling. Ask a founder two things: what do you understand about this market that most smart people get wrong? and who can you reach today that a stranger couldn’t? The first is Thiel’s secret wearing founder-market-fit clothes. Strong, specific answers are the signal. A compelling life story that happens to rhyme with the product is exactly the thing to be skeptical of, in others and in yourself.

References

Azoulay, P., Jones, B. F., Kim, J. D., & Miranda, J. (2018). Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship. NBER Working Paper 24489; published in American Economic Review: Insights 2(1), 65-82 (2020). Prior experience in the specific industry is itself a strong predictor of founding a top-growth firm. nber.org/papers/w24489 · AER: Insights
Dixon, C. (2011). Founder/market fit. cdixon.org, June 19, 2011. Popularized the term (crediting David Lee of SV Angel): the founders deeply understand, and “personify,” the market they are entering, including the ability to reach and read the customer. cdixon.org
Tamaseb, A. (2021). Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups. PublicAffairs. Across 200-plus billion-dollar startups, only about 30% of founders had directly relevant industry experience, so founder-market fit was neither the norm nor a precondition for the winners. superfoundersbook.com · author’s data write-up
Thiel, P., with Masters, B. (2014). Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. Crown Business. The “secret” and the contrarian test, “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”, a proxy for the non-consensus insight underneath real founder-market fit. publisher
Stone, B. (2013). The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. Little, Brown. In September 1994 Bezos took a four-day American Booksellers Association bookselling course in Portland while, at D.E. Shaw, researching the web’s explosive growth, which he pegged near 2,300% a year. publisher

Full source library for this brief: the Research Library.

When to Pivot: What the Evidence Says About Timing

2026-04-15T00:00:00-04:00

The short version

Successful companies are constantly pivoting. Pivoting isn’t a failure, it’s core to how good companies find their market. The research says the healthy version is evidence-driven and usually partial: you change the one variable your experiments proved wrong, often the customer or the wedge, and keep what’s working. The real danger isn’t pivoting too much. It’s inertia, riding a wrong assumption straight into the wall because no one on the team will call it. The signal to watch isn’t a single bad month. It’s a pattern of your core assumptions failing the same way.

“Know when to pivot” is the kind of useless advice we hear all the time. It sounds simple, but it lacks any real clarity. Pivot too early, and are you quitting before the idea ever got a fair shot? Pivot too late, and are you just being stubborn, ignoring the market and the advisors telling you the truth? I’ve watched founders fall into both. So let’s dive in.

What the research points to

Start here: successful companies are constantly pivoting. Look closely at almost any brand you admire and you’ll find a trail of experiments, in the product, the positioning, what they sell and how they sell it. Pivoting isn’t the mistake. It’s core to how good companies find their market.

Pivots are common among the winners, and they can be small or large.^{1, 4} The good ones usually change one variable, the customer, the framing, the wedge, while keeping the insight the team has already earned.¹ Wholesale resets are rarer and riskier.
The real danger is inertia, not pivoting. Keep driving in the wrong direction and you will, for sure, slam into a wall. Knowing something isn’t working is the whole prerequisite for changing course. And here’s the catch: usually the team already knows. The founder already knows. But only great teams have the internal honesty, and the healthy conflict, to say it out loud and call it what it is.³
Constantly test your assumptions. Starting a company bakes in a stack of assumptions, about the direction, the go-to-market, the execution, the pricing, and a dozen other things. Every week you’re testing them and learning which hold and which don’t. When one turns out to be false, that’s your cue. Use it. The data is clear that these evidence-based pivots significantly outperform reactionary ones off a bad week or a competitor’s launch.²

If you’re sailing and you hit something, you don’t just keep going. You take inventory. You figure out which way to head next. Maybe it’s a small correction, maybe it’s a hard turn, but either way it’s an adjustment. The fact that you were pointed the wrong way in the first place is a sunk cost. It doesn’t matter anymore. The only thing that matters is what you do next.

A usable test

Before you pivot, write down the specific assumptions that failed and how you know. If you can name a repeated, evidence-backed failure of a core assumption, customers don’t actually have the pain, or you can’t reach them affordably, that’s a real signal. If what you’ve got is discouragement and a shiny new idea, that’s noise. The strongest founders we see treat the pivot like any other experiment: hypothesis, evidence, call.²

And some of the best pivots never feel like pivots at all. Great companies get pulled into their markets. A small experiment, a usage pattern, a side feature nobody prioritized suddenly catches on, with the dev team, with a customer, with a corner of the market you weren’t even aiming at. In the moment it just feels like the experimentation you wanted. That pull is the real signal. Don’t treat a pivot as a negative. Treat it as an extension of the same learning that got you this far.

References

Rachitsky, L. (2024). The Art of the Pivot, Part 1: The Definitive List of Successful Pivots. Lenny’s Newsletter, with a companion dataset of 33+ dissected pivots. About 1 in 3 B2B startups pivots before its big idea, and successful pivots usually keep a working piece and change one thing. lennysnewsletter.com
Camuffo, A., Cordova, A., Gambardella, A., & Spina, C. (2020). A Scientific Approach to Entrepreneurial Decision Making. Management Science 66(2), 564-586 (large-scale replication in Strategic Management Journal, 2024). Founders trained to test assumptions like scientists kill bad ideas faster and run a few well-chosen pivots rather than none or many. Open PDF · INFORMS · 2024 replication
CB Insights (2021). The Top Reasons Startups Fail. Analysis of startup post-mortems. Running out of cash and no market need are among the most common failure modes, the trap founders hit when they stay on a dead path too long. cbinsights.com
Tamaseb, A. (2021). Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups. PublicAffairs. Many billion-dollar startups pivoted before their winning idea, so pivoting is common rather than a mark of failure. superfoundersbook.com

Full source library for this brief: the Research Library.

Does Founder Age Predict Success?

2026-03-20T00:00:00-04:00

The short version

The idea that the best founders are barely out of college is one of venture’s most repeated beliefs, and one of the least backed by evidence. The most rigorous study on the question, a Census-scale look at high-growth US startups, found the average founder was around 45. The picture is genuinely contested. Studies of venture-backed unicorn cohorts put the median closer to 34. What no serious dataset supports is the 22-year-old genius as the base rate. Youth isn’t the edge. Relevant experience is.

We’ve all seen the startup movies. The Social Network. The Steve Jobs biopics. We’ve all heard how Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard, how Michael Dell built PCs out of his dorm room. The myth of the 20-something hoodie-wearing dropout is everywhere. But peel back the data, and something’s off.

What if the young founder is the exception?

In 2018, a group of researchers set out to test whether the myth held up. Azoulay, Jones, Kim and Miranda ran the biggest study anyone has run on the question. Not a survey, not a scrape of the famous names. US Census administrative records covering 2.7 million founders, about as close to the whole population as you get. Here’s what they found:¹

The average age of founders of the highest-growth startups (the top 1-in-1,000 by growth) was about 45.0.
A 50-year-old founder was roughly 1.8x more likely than a 30-year-old to found a top-performing company.
Prior experience in the specific industry was itself a strong predictor of success.

This is the peer-reviewed source behind the Harvard Business Review headline everyone quotes, “The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45.”² One finding, not two. Cite the study, not the write-up.

But it’s genuinely contested

Not every dataset lands on 45, and the disagreement is the interesting part. Look at recent Y Combinator batches and you’ll see the opposite picture, cohorts skewing hard into the early-to-mid 20s. The young founder really is more likely to code all night. But Basis Set Ventures, in a review called Founder Superpowers where early investors managing over $40B rated 60-plus funded founders, concluded that age doesn’t determine success.³ And Ali Tamaseb’s Super Founders, built on 30,000-plus data points across billion-dollar startups founded between 2005 and 2018, still puts the median founder age at 34.⁴ Older than the venture stereotype, younger than the Census average.

Both can be true. Here’s the difference. Azoulay and colleagues measure the entire high-growth population from Census records. Basis Set and Tamaseb measure venture-backed cohorts, meaning unicorns and heavily funded startups. VCs skew toward younger founders, so a venture-backed sample reads younger than the full field of fast-growing firms. So the honest read is this: the “older founders win” result is strongest for high-growth companies broadly, and softer inside the narrow slice VCs actually fund. Live, not settled.

The outliers everyone remembers

So why does the myth survive? A handful of enormous outliers, Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, own the story precisely because they became household names, and survivorship bias does the rest. It’s like judging the whole ocean by the three boats that made the America’s Cup highlight reel. Those boats are real. They’re nothing like the thousands of others actually out on the water. I call this the highlight-reel average: everyone’s seen the trailer, almost nobody checks the full film.

Two things the trailer leaves out. First, those companies didn’t hit real billion-dollar scale until their founders were well out of their twenties. The founding photo is young. The scaling years mostly weren’t. Second, even the young legends rarely did it alone. When Google was finding its feet, the board brought in Eric Schmidt, a seasoned operator roughly twice the founders’ age, as what the press openly called “adult supervision.” The pattern underneath the myth is the same one the data keeps showing. Experience in the room matters.

What it means for founders and funds

If you’re an experienced operator quietly wondering whether you’re “too late,” the data is firmly on your side. Domain experience is an asset, not an expiration date, and it’s often the thing that lets you spot a wedge a younger founder can’t even see yet.

I routinely talk to founders who are further along in their careers and are quietly convinced they’ve missed their window. I tell them the same thing. Some of the most important companies out there were started by founders who were nowhere near their twenties. Reed Hastings was 37 when he started Netflix. Robert Noyce co-founded Intel at 40. David Duffield built PeopleSoft in his mid-40s, then founded Workday, now worth tens of billions, at 65. The window is far wider than the highlight reel suggests.

Here’s where I land. I don’t think we should be looking at age much at all. Age is a proxy, and a bad one. The real question is experience: how deeply does this founder understand the market and the opportunity, and how far does their ability to execute stretch, into building teams, hiring, scaling? Entrepreneurship is a skill that compounds. All else equal, the founder who’s been compounding it longer will outperform the one who hasn’t. Sometimes that’s a 45-year-old operator. Sometimes it’s someone who started at 19 and did their compounding in public. Age was never the signal. Accumulated judgment is.

References

Azoulay, P., Jones, B. F., Kim, J. D., & Miranda, J. (2018). Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship. NBER Working Paper 24489; published in American Economic Review: Insights 2(1), 65-82 (2020). US Census records on 2.7 million founders: the average founder of a top-growth startup was about 45, and a 50-year-old was roughly 1.8x more likely than a 30-year-old to build one. nber.org/papers/w24489 · AER: Insights
Azoulay, Jones, Kim & Miranda (2018). “Research: The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45.” Harvard Business Review, July 11, 2018. The popular write-up of [1]. hbr.org
Basis Set Ventures (2023). Founder Superpowers: What Makes a Successful Founder. Early investors managing over $40B rated 60-plus funded founders and concluded that age doesn’t determine success. basisset.com/founder-superpowers
Tamaseb, A. (2021). Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups. PublicAffairs. Across billion-dollar startups founded 2005-2018, the median founder age was 34. superfoundersbook.com · CNBC summary

Full source library for this brief: the Research Library.

The Second-Time Founder’s Edge

2026-02-18T00:00:00-05:00

The short version

There’s a saying in investing: past performance is no guarantee of future results. In entrepreneurship that mostly holds too, and yet repeat founders clearly do carry an edge. They raise faster and often on better terms. The nuance is what that edge is actually made of. Prior success predicts the next win far more than experience on its own, and a big piece of the advantage is reputation and relationships, the proven team and network a founder can call again, not pure operating genius. The good news for first-timers: most of it is learnable, and a first-time failure penalizes you far less than the mystique claims.

There’s a saying that past performance is no guarantee of future success. That’s certainly true in entrepreneurship. And yet, once you’ve actually been through the whole journey, you walk away with a few cheat codes. They’re real. They’re just fewer, and more conditional, than the serial-founder mystique likes to sell.

What the evidence supports

Prior success is the strongest signal. A founder whose last company worked has about a 30% shot at success on the next one, versus roughly 20% for a first-timer.¹ One thing to clear up, because that 20% collides with the famous “most startups fail” number in everyone’s head: “success” here isn’t survival. It’s a real venture-scale outcome, in the study, taking the company public. Almost nobody clears that bar. Clearing it once roughly lifts your odds of clearing it again by half. And what carries the signal is prior success, not prior experience on its own. In the data on billion-dollar startups, repeat founders show up far more often than their share of the founder population would predict.⁵
The edge is relationships, not just reputation. Repeat founders get warmer access to capital and talent, investors respond strongly to who’s on the founding team, and a track record lifts both the odds of getting funded and the valuation on offer.^{2, 3, 4} But reputation is only half of it. The bigger, quieter advantage is the Rolodex: the vendors, partners, and customers who already trust them, and above all the people who built and de-risked the first company and will pick up the phone to do it again. I call this the borrowed edge. A first-timer is assembling that network from scratch. A second-timer is just redialing it.

Where the edge is thinner than it looks

Experience alone is a weaker predictor than folks assume. Having founded something before helps less than having founded something that worked.¹ The reps only count when they compound into judgment.
A first-time failure isn’t disqualifying. In the data, founders whose last company failed do about as well next time as first-timers, not worse.¹ A failure still stings, but one you can explain crisply, what you believed, what happened, and what you’d do differently, usually reads as earned judgment.
When the second one stumbles, it’s often founder-market drift. Here’s a pattern I notice, and it’s a hunch more than a dataset: when an experienced founder misses the second time, it’s frequently because they wandered off the market they actually knew. The first company leaned on hard-won founder-market fit. The second bet on a shinier space where they were a tourist again. Experience travels. Domain knowledge often doesn’t.

For first-time founders

Here’s the part I most want first-timers to hear: you don’t need to go the venture route to start compounding this. The entrepreneurial muscle builds early and in miniature. A lemonade stand, a paper route, a dorm-room side hustle, they all teach the same core moves. Talk to a customer. Run a small experiment. Notice what isn’t working. Change it. Go again. It was never about your first company being the billion-dollar one. It’s about building the skills, the customer discovery, the experimentation, the willingness to bend your own plan, that de-risk both this business and the next one.

And the repeat founder’s built edge, sharper prioritization, faster hiring, a cleaner fundraising story, mostly transfers this way. Even the decision-making trains: in controlled trials, founders taught to test their assumptions like scientists made sharper calls and killed bad ideas faster.⁶ That’s a big part of why hands-on early-stage investors exist, and it’s exactly the gap our playbooks are built to shrink.

I sometimes introduce myself as a recovering entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship, once you have a taste for it, ends up being fairly addictive. Not because of the money, but because of how empowering it can be. It’s like a video game, and every time you play, you want to level up.

That’s the real second-time edge. Not a cheat code you’re born with. One you earn, a level at a time.

References

Gompers, P., Kovner, A., Lerner, J., & Scharfstein, D. (2010). Performance Persistence in Entrepreneurship. Journal of Financial Economics 96(1), 18-32. Previously successful founders succeed at roughly 30% next time, versus about 20% for first-timers and for founders whose prior company failed. Open PDF (NY Fed) · journal
Hsu, D. H. (2007). Experienced Entrepreneurial Founders, Organizational Capital, and Venture Capital Funding. Research Policy 36(5), 722-741. Prior successful founding raises both the likelihood of VC funding and the venture’s valuation. SSRN
Gompers, P., Gornall, W., Kaplan, S. N., & Strebulaev, I. A. (2020). How Do Venture Capitalists Make Decisions? Journal of Financial Economics 135(1); NBER WP 22587. VCs rate the founding team above the business, and weigh the founders’ track record heavily. nber.org/papers/w22587
Bernstein, S., Korteweg, A., & Laws, K. (2017). Attracting Early-Stage Investors: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment. Journal of Finance 72(2), 509-538. Investors respond strongly to founding-team information, but not to traction or existing lead investors. Wiley
Tamaseb, A. (2021). Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups. PublicAffairs. Repeat founders are overrepresented among unicorn founders relative to the base rate. superfoundersbook.com
Camuffo, A., Cordova, A., Gambardella, A., & Spina, C. (2020). A Scientific Approach to Entrepreneurial Decision Making. Management Science 66(2), 564-586 (large-scale replication in Strategic Management Journal, 2024). INFORMS · 2024 replication

Full source library for this brief: the Research Library.

Do You Need a Co-Founder? How to Decide, and How to Find the Right One

2025-05-20T00:00:00-04:00

The short version

Whether you need a co-founder depends on your skill gaps and whether you’re raising venture capital, where investors lean toward teams. If you do look for one, start with people you’ve actually worked with (past coworkers make the most stable teams), search deliberately for complementary skills, and test the fit on a real project with a vesting schedule before you commit. A strong early hire can beat the wrong co-founder.

Do You Really Need a Co-Founder?

I get this question a lot: Do I need a co-founder? The answer? It depends.

At my prior company, Wishroute, I started as a solo founder and brought on a technical co-founder after I had validated initial customer demand. We collaborated for about a year before he took on that title. We met through a combination of me posting on Angellist (now wellfound) and going to a co-founder matching event!

At FoundersEdge, Greg was doing research on how to bring more data and rigor to pre-seed investing and asked me to collaborate with him. We met when he angel invested in my prior company years before. We worked together over the course of about six months before teaming up as co-founders.

When a Co-Founder Matters Most

Fundraising: If you’re raising venture capital, having multiple co-founders (+ complete skillset) is often a positive signal. Investors bet on teams, and most unicorns have had multiple co-founders. Solo founders can work too though!
Skill Gaps: If you lack core skills required to build and scale the business, a co-founder might be the right move. Example: You’re a G2M expert founder but need deep technical expertise.
Execution Capacity: Some solo founders can manage it all, but if you find yourself stretched too thin and don’t have a budget to hire, a co-founder can help you scale faster if they’re the right fit.

When a Co-Founder Might Not Be Necessary

If you can hire for the gaps: If the skills you’re missing can be filled by a key early hire rather than a high % equity-holding co-founder, that may be the better path. Especially if you have the expertise to know what exceptional looks like and can hire and manage the person.
If your company doesn’t require VC: Most businesses grow well without venture funding, and everyone’s goals are different.

📊 Stats to consider: About 80% of billion-dollar startups were founded by teams, but solo founders still succeed. Think Jeff Bezos, Melanie Perkins (Canva), and Whitney Wolfe Herd (Bumble). However, co-founder conflict can also ruin a company! Studies vary and report 13%-65% of startups fail due to co-founder conflict.

Losing a Co-Founder? Here’s What to Do Next

Losing a co-founder is tough, especially when you’ve invested time and effort into the relationship. But it’s better to part ways early than to realize too late that it wasn’t the right fit. If you’re feeling like you’re starting over - you’re not. You’re moving forward.

Here’s my best advice for finding a new co-founder or key hire quickly:

Step 1: Tap Existing Network

Harvard Business School professor Noam Wasserman studied nearly 10,000 founders of startups. 40% of founding teams include people who were friends socially before building their startups.

Interestingly, the least stable founding teams were friends. Wasserman discovered that the most stable teams were past coworkers. And other research on high-tech startups demonstrates that when founding team members have collaborated in the past, their ventures have faster growth rates.

Reflect on your existing network and reconnect with potentially aligned collaborators. Search first-connections on LinkedIn for skillsets or industries to remember who you know!

Step 2: Be Proactive – Search for Expertise and Talk about What You’re Building

If you strike out with first connections, be proactive.

✔️ Search LinkedIn for people with relevant expertise or other needed skills.
✔️ Look for warm introductions - Ask mutual connections for intros.
✔️ Share what you’re building publicly! Matches can happen through cold outreach or unexpected viral posts.
✔️ Try cold outreach: 📩 “Hey [Name], I saw your experience in [XYZ] and I’m building [Startup Name]. Looking for someone to collaborate with - would love to chat!”

Step 3: Leverage Events & Founder Communities

You never know who you’ll meet:

Get out into the startup community - attend founder meetups, accelerators, and networking events. Attend Startup Weekends, Techstars events, or local founder mixers hosted by accelerators and universities.
While there’s little data on this approach, you could consider exploring online platforms like Next Play Slack community or YC’s Co-Founder Matching platform.
Ask everyone you meet, “Who do you know that might be a fit?”
When I was searching, it took me 30+ coffee chats to find my co-founder at Wishroute—but it was worth it.

Step 4: Explore Interim Solutions Before Committing

You can’t force a co-founder relationship. Many founders bridge the gap by validating their idea and building momentum first. Makes it easier to attract the right person to take the risk and come on board with you!

If you’re a non-technical founder:

✔️ Test demand with a no-code prototype – Use tools like Lovable or Bubble to build a low-code MVP. If you can show there’s real demand and that you can reach customers (often the hardest part), it becomes much easier to recruit a co-founder or partner to take the risk with you.
✔️ Recruit strategically – If you have the budget, a recruiter can help you find specialized talent quickly. Hunt Club and Twill are my go-tos.
✔️ Outsource smartly – A contractor or dev shop can build your MVP while you search for a long-term partner. The key is don’t overbuild. Start small, and test everything you can without building.

Step 5: Test the Fit Before You Commit

Rushing into a co-founder relationship is very risky. This isn’t something you can force. Instead…

Try before you buy: Work on a project together before signing any agreements.

Use a vesting schedule: No one should walk away with half the company too early.

💡 Pro Tip: Don’t just align on skills - talk values, working styles, and goals. Spend time socially and in work settings. It’s a long-term relationship. Ask: What does success look like for each of you in 2 years? 5 years? 10 years?

What’s Worked

I posted on LinkedIn to hear other founder stories, here are some of the ways that they found co-founders:

✔️ Start With People You Know and Trust

Many founders started with someone close — a co-founder, sibling, spouse, or friend — because deep trust and communication styles were already established. → “Best decision ever. We could be no BS with each other and get things done.”
Personal connections through partners or social circles often led to meaningful introductions.

✔️ Tap into Existing Work Relationships

Former co-workers or early hires turned co-founders after demonstrating shared values, execution, and grit. → One founder said their co-founder overdelivered as an early team member and earned trust over time.

✔️ Use School and Accelerator Networks

Founders met through university programs, startup accelerators, or venture competitions. → Startup weekends and programs like Techstars helped founders test ideas with potential teammates.

✔️ Be Strategic with Outreach

LinkedIn, AngelList, and even TikTok have led to strong co-founder matches. → One founder met their partner through a cold outreach after seeing a job post for a CTO role.

✔️ What Made It Work

Pre-existing trust made hard conversations easier.
Complementary strengths helped avoid skill gaps.
Trial periods (projects before equity) helped confirm fit.
Values alignment was a key predictor of long-term success → “Find someone whose energy pushes you to be better. If you feel you’re always pulling, it won’t work.”

Investor Mindset: What I Look for at Pre-Seed

As a pre-seed investor, we bet on teams first - product and market matter, but people are the foundation. Here’s what we’re looking for:

Core skillsets aligned to the startup’s vision: across technical, product, and go-to-market (GTM) execution
Exceptionalism: a demonstrated ability to follow through and succeed in past endeavors
Team cohesiveness: evidence that the team can navigate challenges and conflict together without falling apart

💡 Pro Tip: Landing a co-founder is exciting, but what matters more to VCs is the depth of that relationship. I look for teams who’ve already worked together, weathered tough moments, and proven they can adapt. Shared history of execution = higher odds of long-term success.

Final Thoughts

Finding a co-founder or key hire is one of the most critical decisions a founder makes. Whether you go solo or build with a team, the key is being intentional about skill gaps, expectations, and working styles.

The teams who’ve already worked together, weathered tough moments, and proven they can adapt have a real edge — get that right early, and everything else gets easier.

How Do You Validate a Startup Idea? The Metrics That Matter Before You Have Traction

2025-04-09T00:00:00-04:00

The short version

Early-stage metrics aren’t about scale, they’re about signal. Instead of chasing vanity numbers, list the riskiest assumptions your business depends on, then run small weekly experiments to validate them: that customers have the pain, that your product solves it, that you can reach them profitably, that you have the runway, and that your team executes. Track what you learn in one place and let the signal guide your next move.

Figuring out what to track as an early-stage founder is hard. You’re still finding your ideal customer. Revenue isn’t consistent or recurring yet.

I remember this firsthand. People told me to report weekly KPIs and graph them for investors. But before we had annual contracts or a clear revenue and user growth curve, I kept asking myself: What do I measure for myself and team vs. for my investors?

This playbook is my attempt to answer that—both for the founder I was, and the founders I now back.

Here’s the truth: Early-stage metrics aren’t about scale. They’re about signal.

As a founder-turned-VC, I’ve raised money, built product, and now fund companies at the earliest stages through FoundersEdge. Whether you’re pre-product or just starting to scale, this guide will help you focus on what matters—at the right time.

Why do metrics matter before you have traction?

Startups live or die on whether you’re solving a real problem and can reach the people who have it. The key is understanding:

What assumptions need to be true for you to be successful? (that you can reach customers profitably, that your product works, etc.)
What have you gotten signal/validation on vs. not?
Which are the most important and unvalidated assumptions. Hint: it’s usually not that you can build the product.

Metrics validate assumptions. The best founders don’t wait for revenue to measure progress. They treat discovery like an experiment, using early metrics to build conviction—not to impress investors, but to sharpen instincts and guide their next move.

How to Operationalize Metrics in Your Startup

Knowing what to track is one thing but making it part of how you run the company is where the magic happens. Here’s a simple monthly and weekly rhythm:

Start with your riskiest assumption. Each month pick 1–3 to focus on.
On Mondays, set a measurable weekly goal. Each week, as a team decide which experiments you’ll run. Make sure to define up front:

What the assumption is you’re trying to validate
Scope of experiment
How you’ll measure it
Definition of success & learning goals

Review every Friday. What did we learn? What moved the needle? What’s next?
Track it in one place. Keep it light—Notion, a slide, or a simple spreadsheet is enough.

This rhythm builds clarity and momentum. It’s not about doing more—it’s about learning faster.

Early Metrics to Track Across 5 Common Assumptions

Here are some of the most common assumptions, along with metrics to help you measure what’s working (and what’s not) at each stage of development.

Assumption: Customers Have X Pain Point

Conversion rate of outreach to discovery call
% mention X problem when asked about what’s the #1 thing causing them pain
% of discovery calls that convert into waitlist signups, or even better, early “symbolic” payment for solution (e.g., $20 to join priority beta)
% of waitlist signups that convert to a second meeting to give product mockup / demo feedback
% that pre-pay after seeing product mock-ups
Time from offering customer onboarding to them completing it (they make it a priority)

Assumption: Product Solves Customer Pain Point

Which prototype concept gets “that’s exactly what I need” reactions
Activation rate (% of users that signup and complete the key meaningful action - e.g., first file upload, first week tracked, etc.)
Engagement retention (% of users using core features as often as you’d expect them to)
Net Promoter Score (NPS) / Product-Market Fit Score
Delivering measurable ROI - time saved, customer conversion rate improvement, etc.

Assumption: We Can Reach Customers Profitably and Repeatedly

Channel conversion rates (% of cold phone calls that book & show up for a meeting or % of cold emails / warm intros that book & show for a customer discovery call)
% of visitors who sign up (landing page → signup)
Time-to-first-conversion (how long from first touchpoint to signup and is it shortening?)
Customer acquisition cost (how much you’ve spent / revenue expected from those customers)

Assumption: We Have Enough Resources to Hit Key Milestones

Cash on hand
Monthly burn rate
Revenue (recurring vs. one-time, and % of revenue collected vs. booked)
Actual vs. projected costs per experiment or initiative
Cash flow of customer acquisition (customer acquisition cost vs. payback period)
Customer support costs per user (is this scalable?)
MRR / ARR trends

Assumption: Our Team Can Execute Well Together

Time from insight to action, or experiments run per week (and what was learned)
Weekly retros: What moved us forward? What did we learn? How can we operate better?
% of team time spent on highest-risk assumptions
% of roadmap shipped vs. planned (per sprint / month / quarter)
Bug-to-fix cycle time (how fast are we resolving issues?)

Example: From Idea to Traction — A Landscaping SaaS Startup

Let’s say you’re building a B2B SaaS platform that uses AI to automate backend operations for landscaping companies—scheduling, invoicing, routing, customer communications, etc. You don’t have a product yet—but you’ve got the insight and conviction to start testing.

Step 1: Validate the Pain

What to test: Do landscaping companies feel real pain around backend operations? Is that the most important problem they have?

Actions:

Cold outreach to landscaping businesses via email, calls, LinkedIn
Book customer discovery calls to uncover biggest operational time sinks

Track:

% who reply and book time (signal of interest) → Example: 30% conversion
% who describe the same 1–2 problems in their own words → Example: 80% mention invoicing
% who ask to stay in the loop and be early users → Example: 70% join waitlist

Step 2: Validate the Solution Direction

What to test: Do landscapers see your product vision as a solution worth paying for?

Actions:

Create clickable mockups or lo-fi demo of your platform
Share product vision in follow-up discovery or demo calls and pre-sell (early deposit)

Track:

% of discovery interviewees who book time to see product demo → Example: 70%
% who see mockups that put down a deposit → Example: 65%
Top 1-3 features that seem most important / are missing

Step 3: Test Your Go-to-Market

What to test: Can you consistently reach and convert landscapers?

Actions:

Experiment with 3 outbound channels like cold email, walk-ins, and cold calls
Test 3 core messages across 20 customers for each channel

Track:

Outreach-to-demo conversion rate → Example: cold calls with message B convert at 20%
Channel & message comparison: which source brings the most qualified leads?
Demo-to-paid conversion → Example: 1 out of 3 demos convert to paid customer

Step 4: Test Usage and Onboarding

What to test: Can you get landscapers live and using your product?

Actions:

Set up onboarding flows and define what “onboarded” means
Handhold customers through setup and observe friction
Track time-to-value (first successful job scheduled, invoice generated, etc.)

Track:

Time from signup → first active use
Support tickets or confusion points during onboarding
% that use product daily / fully adopt the solution → Example: 90% adoption

Step 5: Early Revenue Traction

What to test: Are landscapers willing to pay—and is the product sticky?

Actions:

Convert deposits into fully paid plans
Measure product usage and success

Track:

% of deposits that convert to paid → Example: 9 of 14 deposits sign up
Monthly usage (are they still using in month 2, 3?)
Monthly subscription retention → Example: 100% retention month 1 to 2

Bonus: 3 customers referred another business in the first month!

Investor POV: What We Actually Care About

At FoundersEdge, Greg and I invest in clarity of thought. We’re asking ourselves:

Do you know what needs to be true for your business to work?
Are you validating those things in a measurable, focused way?

We’re not looking for vanity metrics. Clarity of communication = clarity of focus.

We’re looking for founders who can tell a story with their numbers—and build confidence in what’s next.

A few things we love to see:

A clear target customer and evidence of early signal
Users engaging weeks and months after sign-up
A clear plan of future experiments to double down on what’s working and grow

What to Avoid

These might look good in a pitch—but often signal a lack of clarity:

“1,200 users” (How many are active? How did you get them? Over what time? Do you have momentum?)
“$100K in revenue” (How much is recurring? If pilots, what’s the timeline for conversion?)
“10 features launched” (Which ones are used? Which ones do your customers sign up for?)

Great metrics help you make decisions and validate your business model and path forward.

Final Thought

If you’re early and unsure, focus on running and measuring experiments to produce signal on what to test next. Remember, that might mean going back to the drawing board and pivoting.

Metrics don’t need to be impressive, they need to be honest. That’s how you build something real.

Want more founder playbooks? Connect with Jess on LinkedIn or reach out to FoundersEdge.

Do Investors Check Your LinkedIn? Here’s Exactly What They Look For

2025-03-05T00:00:00-05:00

The short version

At pre-seed, investors are betting on you, so your LinkedIn is part of your pitch. Before meetings they check that your current startup is your primary role, that your work history connects to what you’re building, and that your team’s profiles match your deck. Quantify your achievements, drop the “Open to Work” banner, keep titles consistent with your pitch, and never exaggerate, because investors fact-check and talk to each other.

As an early-stage investor, I spend significant time on LinkedIn during due diligence. Here’s a truth many founders overlook: at the pre-seed and seed stage, we’re primarily investing in you—the team—because there often isn’t enough company data to evaluate otherwise.

Your LinkedIn profile isn’t just a resume. It’s a critical touchpoint that shapes investor perception before, during, and after your pitch.

What do investors look for on your LinkedIn?

CEO/Founder Profile Assessment

When I visit a founder’s LinkedIn, here’s what I’m looking for:

1. Startup Visibility Does your current startup appear prominently on your profile? This signals full commitment. If you’re listed as “Consultant” or your startup is buried, it raises questions about your focus.

2. Work History Consistency Frequent job changes raise concerns about perseverance. Startups are hard—investors want to see evidence you’ll stick through the tough times.

3. Relevance to Current Venture I look for clear connections between your past roles and current expertise. If you’re building software for restaurants and previously worked in the restaurant industry, make that connection obvious.

Pro tip on terminology: Use consistent language. If you worked in restaurants, say “restaurant”—not “hospitality.” Investors are often scanning quickly, and keyword alignment matters.

4. Quantifiable Achievements Exits, revenue milestones, capital raised, team sizes managed—concrete numbers build credibility. “Grew revenue 3x” is stronger than “helped grow the company.”

Team Member Profiles

I examine your company’s “People” section to verify:

Team composition matches what’s in your pitch deck
Complementary skill sets exist across the founding team
Relevant domain expertise supports each person’s role

Mismatches between your deck and LinkedIn are immediate red flags.

Company Profile Elements

Your company’s LinkedIn page should have:

A working website link
Clear, jargon-free description of your offering
Consistent branding that matches founder profiles
Recent activity showing the company is alive

Green Flags That Build Confidence

✅ Strong narrative showing how co-founder backgrounds support current roles

✅ Evidence of prior working relationships between co-founders

✅ Cohesive branding across all team profiles

✅ Relevant mutual connections in your industry

✅ Endorsements and recommendations from previous collaborators

✅ Active industry engagement through content sharing and thoughtful comments

Red Flags That Raise Concerns

🚩 “Open to Work” banner — Signals divided focus or that this isn’t your primary commitment

🚩 Mismatched titles — If your deck says “CTO” but LinkedIn says “Technical Advisor,” we notice

🚩 Missing team members — People in your pitch deck who don’t appear on LinkedIn, or vice versa

🚩 Sparse job descriptions — Roles without context or achievements suggest you’re hiding something or weren’t impactful

🚩 Frequent position changes — Multiple short stints suggest lack of commitment or difficulty working with others

The Non-Negotiable Rule

Never lie.

Investors will fact-check. Any exaggeration or dishonesty will damage trust—often irreversibly. We talk to each other. Reputation travels.

If you don’t have a traditional pedigree, that’s fine. Many successful founders don’t. But be honest about your background and let your vision, traction, and hustle speak for themselves.

Quick Optimization Checklist

Before your next investor meeting, audit your LinkedIn:

Current startup is your primary position
Headline clearly states your role and company
Work history shows relevant, connected experience
Achievements are quantified where possible
Profile photo is professional
Company page exists and is complete
Team members’ profiles are aligned
No “Open to Work” banner
Recent activity shows industry engagement

The Bottom Line

Your LinkedIn profile is part of your pitch materials, whether you think of it that way or not. Investors are checking before meetings, during due diligence, and when making final decisions.

Take 30 minutes to optimize your profile. It’s one of the highest-ROI activities you can do for your fundraise.

Want more fundraising tips? Connect with me on LinkedIn or reach out to FoundersEdge.

What Should Be in a Pre-Seed Data Room? An Investor’s Checklist

2025-02-20T00:00:00-05:00

The short version

A pre-seed data room is a single, organized folder covering six things: legal/formation, cap table, team & advisor agreements, product & traction, financials, and market/competition. It doesn’t need to be perfect (anything is better than nothing), but having it ready signals you execute and removes friction from due diligence, helping investors say “yes” faster.

What Investors Actually Want to See

Raising capital at the pre-seed stage is an exercise in trust. Investors are betting on you, your vision, and your execution ability more than anything else. But even at this early stage, having a well-structured data room can significantly accelerate due diligence and boost investor confidence.

At FoundersEdge, we review thousands of early-stage startups a year, and the ones that come prepared have an advantage. So, what should you include in your data room to keep the process smooth and maximize your chances of securing funding?

Like most things, don’t let perfect get in the way of good. Anything is better than nothing!

What should a pre-seed data room include?

1. Company Formation & Legal Docs

Articles of incorporation
Any registered IP (patents, trademarks, copyrights)
Bonus: Any other operating agreements / proof of good standing

Why? Investors want to confirm the company is legally structured and ready for funding.

2. Cap Table & Founder Equity

Current cap table (even if it’s simple)
Any existing SAFE/convertible notes or outstanding debt
Founder stock agreements & vesting schedules

Why? Transparency on ownership structure avoids surprises. A messy cap table at pre-seed can deter future investors.

3. Employee & Advisor Agreements

Any employee contracts or offer letters (investors will be looking for IP assignment clauses and understanding who is on the team)
Advisor agreements & any equity granted

Why? Clear equity and IP ownership prevent disputes down the line.

4. Product & Traction

Product demo (video or loom walkthrough)
Key user engagement data (WAUs, retention, etc. how do you know product is working / your customers love it?)
Customer contracts
Sales pipeline (for B2B startups)
Bonus: customer testimonials and/or case studies and current product roadmap / mockups
Bonus: last 2-3 investor or community updates, showing you communicate consistently

Why? Even at pre-seed, investors want to see momentum. This helps validate problem-market fit.

5. Financials & Tax Filings

Current financial statements (P&L, cash flow, balance sheet)
Most recent tax return
Monthly burn rate & runway forecast

Why? At this stage, cash flow management is critical. Even if revenue is $0, showing financial discipline is a plus.

6. Market Research & Competitive Landscape

Any relevant market size research (TAM/SAM/SOM estimates)
Competitive analysis—how do you differentiate? Who do you have your eye on?

Why? Investors want confidence that the market is large enough and that you have a path to capturing value.

Bonus Tips for a Standout Data Room

Use a Secure & Organized Folder Structure — Google Drive, Dropbox, or DocSend work well. Avoid a chaotic file dump.
Keep It Up to Date — Investors may revisit the data room multiple times. Ensure numbers are fresh. Note as of what date the data room is updated.
Keep It Simple — Don’t overload with irrelevant details. Logically name files for ease of navigation.

Final Thought: It’s a Trust-Building Exercise

A great pre-seed data room isn’t just about impressing investors—it’s about reducing friction in the fundraising process and showing how you execute. The easier you make it for investors to say “yes,” the faster you’ll close!

How Do You Write Investor Updates That Keep Investors Engaged?

2025-02-11T00:00:00-05:00

The short version

Sending consistent investor updates is one of the cheapest ways to improve your fundraising odds. Aim for monthly, keep a fuller version for investors and a lighter one for your wider community, and always include a one-liner, wins, challenges, key metrics, and a specific ask. Anything is better than nothing, and being honest about what’s not working builds more trust than hiding it. Templates for three update styles are below.

I’ve been there. It’s late, things aren’t going as planned, and you lean toward skipping a community or investor update. Maybe you tell yourself:

“I don’t know what to say.”
“I should be focused on more mission-critical tasks.”
“What if they judge me?”

These are all common reasons founders skip updates. And skipping is also a huge mistake.

When I was a founder, through the highs and lows, I sent monthly updates to my mentors, friends, and investors. That consistency led to followers becoming investors, investors doubling down, key customer introductions, and game-changing hires.

Investors invest in stories and people they trust. Keeping them updated isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s a sign of respect and a trust-building mechanism. Transparency builds confidence. A founder who consistently communicates progress—good or bad—earns long-term investor and community support.

Yet now, as an investor, I see so many founders not sending them. And I get it—I’m here to help!

This isn’t a guilt trip. It’s a wake-up call. And this guide will make sending them easy, effective, and worth your time.

Why Bother? What’s In It for You?

✅ Attract new investors – Great updates get mentors/friends/advisors excited and they may become investors. Great updates also get forwarded to others!

✅ Keep current investors engaged & build trust – Transparency builds confidence and turns investors into long-term allies who may re-invest.

✅ Unlock help – Investors won’t know how to help unless you ask. Updates are your chance to get intros, hiring support, and more.

✅ Stay accountable & focused – Writing updates forces you to reflect on progress, challenges, and upcoming priorities.

How often should you send investor updates?

I generally recommend monthly.

Bi-monthly or quarterly is okay too if you’re not gearing up to fundraise.

Audience: Who to Send Updates To

I believe in the value of building community and keeping as many people updated on your journey as possible - all people who can help! Startups take a village, build yours.

I suggest initially having one version, and then once you have investors, create two.

📍 V1: Full update including customer names & financials to send to your investors

📍 V2: A lighter version can go to community supporters, mentors, & prospective investors—a great way to build relationships before your next raise.

What should you include in an investor update?

One thing that trips founders up is overwhelm or seeing examples that don’t match their stage. So let’s break it down! Below are three types of updates:

1. The “I’m otherwise going to skip” Update

ANYTHING is better than nothing. Don’t let being too busy stop you from staying in touch. Here’s an ultra-quick update that still counts.

📢 Subject: [Company] [Month] Update

Hey [Investor Name],

It’s been a packed month, but I wanted to send a quick update to keep you in the loop:

1️⃣ One-Liner: One sentence description of what company does

📌 Win: We [shipped X / signed a new pilot with Y / hit a key milestone]

🚧 Challenge: [Hiring / a key bottleneck / fundraising runway] is our top focus—working on solutions now.

🙏 Ask: We’re looking for advice on [hiring a sales leader, fundraising, etc.] or intros to [specific role at specific company type]. If you know someone let me know and I’ll send you a forwardable email!

More soon, but appreciate your support as always. If you have ideas or want to connect 1-1, here’s the link to my calendar.

[Your Name]

2. The Early Traction Update

Remember to tell a story. Give people context to understand why you’re focused on what you are, how it’s going, what you’re learning, and what’s next.

📌 One-Liner: Quick reminder of what your company does.

📌 Quick Overview: 2-3 sentence intro covering highlights & overall sentiment.

Key Updates:

🔹 Biggest wins this month (e.g., new customer, product launch, major partnership)
🔹 Biggest challenges & learnings this month (e.g., long sales cycle, team attrition, bug in product)

OR use this format:

🔹 Sales/Pilots – Updates on pipeline & traction
🔹 Product – Feature performance & upcoming launches
🔹 Team – Hiring & key team changes

KPIs & Financials (typically includes):

Revenue (compared to last month)
Burn rate
Months of runway

Goals for next month – For instance, experiment with 10 cold calls/week, hire 2 computer science interns, etc.

Asks – Be specific & actionable!

Thanks & Closing – Acknowledge investors, advisors, or team members who helped.

3. The Repeatable Traction Update

Numbers and graphs are your friend! Show how things are progressing visually to paint a clear picture.

1️⃣ One-Liner: One sentence description of what company does (remind people!)

2️⃣ Quick Overview: 2-3 sentence introduction covering highlights / overall sentiment of what’s going on

3️⃣ Key Updates:

Customer Traction & Sales

Updates on # of customers, revenue per customer, free-to-paid conversion, sales pipeline etc. either in graph form or month-over-month
Learnings from this month

Product Updates

What’s going well (consider showing graph of usage data and product KPIs!)
What are you learning / key challenges
Upcoming features

Team Updates

What’s going well, not going well, and upcoming team needs

Financials

MRR: $2.5K (up from $1.8K last month)
Burn Rate: $18K/month (down $1k from last month)
Runway: 9 months (down 1 month from last month)
Any other KPIs

Goals for upcoming month

Top 3-5 priorities

Asks

How followers can help!

Thanks & Closing

Shout out an investor, advisor, or team member who went above and beyond. Gratitude goes a long way in strengthening relationships.

What Makes A Great Investor Update?

📈 Bullets & visuals

📙 Story arch

🔢 Real # & metrics

🤔 Show how you learn & iterate

⏳ Consistency

🤝 Transparency & Vulnerability

Maximizing your Asks

🎯 The more specific, the better.

🚫 Instead of: “Looking for intros to investors.”

✅ Try: “Looking for angel investors with a background in Marketing tech.”

Even better—include a target list or pre-filtered LinkedIn search.

Make it easy for someone to make an intro. If you need help, check out my guide on best practices for forwardable emails.

Tools for Sending Updates

Don’t let fancy formatting stand in the way of sending updates. But, here are my favorites:

📌 Paperstreet – Easy formatting & audience segmentation.

📌 YAMM – Email automation + unsubscribe handling.

📌 Gmail (BCC method) – Simple & free!

What If Things Aren’t Going Well?

That’s okay! It’s a startup—seasoned mentors and investors expect ups and downs.

Great founders don’t hide problems—they show how they’re tackling them. Investors appreciate honesty, especially if paired with a plan or an ask.

Still don’t know what to say? Look inwards. If you lack strategic focus, tap an advisor for clarity—and include that in your update. You might be surprised who reaches out to help.

Hope this guide was helpful! Connect with me on LinkedIn or reach out to the FoundersEdge team for more fundraising guidance.

How Do You Write a Forwardable Intro Email to Investors?

2025-01-13T00:00:00-05:00

The short version

A forwardable email is an intro request your introducer can send as-is with one line on top. Make it effortless to forward, lead with a specific “why,” and briefly say who you are and what you’re building. Start a fresh thread instead of burying it in a reply, keep it short, and follow up once after about 10 days. A plug-and-play template is below.

I love maximizing my network to support the founders I work with. I make multiple meaningful introductions every day. It’s one of my favorite parts of the job!

But here’s the thing: warm intros are an art, and there’s a right (and wrong) way to request one. A well-crafted forwardable email makes it seamless for the introducer to help you and easy for the recipient to say “yes.”

Below, I’m sharing my top tips to maximize your warm intro requests—including 3 mistakes to avoid.

Why do forwardable emails matter?

When someone agrees to make an introduction, they’re already going out of their way to help you. Your job? Make it as easy as possible for them to do so. A great forwardable email:

Saves the introducer time. They can forward it as-is with a quick note.
Gives the recipient context to make a quick “yes” or “no” decision.
Clearly communicates your value and request.

Anything less adds friction—and friction kills momentum.

3 Key Ingredients for a Strong Forwardable Email

1) Make the Introducer’s Job Effortless

The introducer should be able to forward it as is with a quick note on top. No rewrites. No copy and paste and no formatting headaches. Then reply on the original thread that you sent them a new, clean forwardable email.

2) Include the “Why” Up Front

Be specific about why you want the intro. A clear purpose shows you’ve done your homework and makes it easier for the recipient to engage. Examples:

“I’m looking for advice on scaling a B2B sales team and I saw from LinkedIn that Katie has relevant experience doing that at ABC Company.”

“I’m fundraising and believe Greg would resonate with our mission given his previous investment in ABC Company and because his fund focuses on Pre-seed Hardware companies.”

Briefly share who you are and what problem your company solves for what type of customer. Highlight your success and traction so the recipient feels meeting with you will be worth their time.

If you’re fundraising, link to a short pitch deck so the investor can do a quick check to make sure company and stage wise you’re in their thesis.

3 Common Mistakes to Avoid

1) Not Starting a New Email Thread

Don’t reply on the current thread with a blurb, unless they’ve requested that. This forces the introducer to copy, paste, and reformat everything before forwarding it. It’s extra work for them—and that reduces your chance the introduction happens.

Make it easy for them to hit “forward,” add a sentence of context, and move on with their day.

2) Making It Too Long or Vague

Don’t overcomplicate things. A forwardable email should be concise and give them just enough context on you and your ask so they can decide whether they can or want to help. If the recipient has to hunt for what you’re asking or read too many paragraphs, they’ll likely ignore it.

3) Not Following Up

Snooze the conversation for 10 days and circle back if you haven’t heard back. They may have forgotten or it got lost. One nudge is appropriate in my book if I’ve offered something!

A Simple Framework for Forwardable Emails

Here’s a plug-and-play template to get you started:

Subject: Intro Request: [Your Name] <> [Recipient’s Name]

Hi [Introducer’s Name],

Thanks so much for offering to connect me with [Recipient’s Name]!

Here’s some quick context for them:

I’m the founder of [Company Name], which is [1-sentence description of what you do and for who]. [1-2 sentences or 3 bullet points with your traction].

I’m hoping to chat with you about [specific reason—advice, feedback, hiring, investment, etc.].

Happy to work around your schedule. Feel free to share a link to your calendar, or if it’s easier mine is here. Thanks for the consideration!

Best, [Your Name]

This structure works because it’s:

Easy to forward. No reformatting needed.
Includes relevant context. The recipient knows who you are and why.
Clear call to action. They know exactly what you’re asking for.

From my own experience as a founder, these forwardable emails unlocked investor meetings, customer connections, mentor relationships, and even key hires. The best intros happen when you remove friction and respect everyone’s time!

Want more founder playbooks? Connect with Jess on LinkedIn or reach out to FoundersEdge.

What Should a Pre-Seed Pitch Deck Include? A Slide-by-Slide Guide from 100+ Founder Pitches

2025-01-07T00:00:00-05:00

The short version

A strong early-stage pitch deck is 10 to 12 slides, each making one clear point, told as a story: problem, then solution, then why this team. Keep it under 15 slides, lead with a pain the investor can feel, and treat the team slide as a headline act, because at pre-seed you are the investment. The ten slides below are the spine; the nine mistakes after them are what sink otherwise good decks.

As a former B2B SaaS founder turned angel investor at FoundersEdge, I’ve had the privilege of sitting on both sides of the pitch table. Having met with over 100 founders since making this transition, I’ve gathered insights on what makes pitch decks truly effective.

There’s magic in recency—my recent shift from founder to investor gives me a fresh perspective on what resonates and what falls flat.

What slides does an early-stage pitch deck need?

Here’s the slide-by-slide breakdown that I recommend for early-stage founders:

1. Cover Slide

Your first impression matters. Keep it clean with your company name, tagline, and contact information. Make sure your logo is professional and your one-liner immediately communicates what you do.

2. Problem

Paint a vivid picture of the pain point you’re solving. Use specific data or customer quotes to make it tangible. Investors need to feel the problem before they can appreciate your solution.

3. Solution & Product

Show, don’t just tell. Include product screenshots, demos, or mockups. Explain how your solution directly addresses the problem you just outlined.

4. Team

At the early stage, you ARE the investment. Highlight relevant experience, past exits, domain expertise, and why your team is uniquely positioned to solve this problem.

5. Market Opportunity

Define your TAM, SAM, and SOM clearly. Show the market is large enough to build a venture-scale business, but be realistic—investors see through inflated numbers.

6. Business Model

How do you make money? Be specific about pricing, unit economics, and your path to profitability. Show you understand the levers of your business.

7. Traction

What proof points do you have? Revenue, users, partnerships, waitlists—whatever demonstrates market validation. Even early traction speaks volumes.

8. Competition & Differentiation

Acknowledge competitors exist (saying “we have no competition” is a red flag). Show your unique positioning and sustainable competitive advantages.

9. Go-to-Market

How will you acquire customers? Be specific about channels, costs, and your early customer acquisition strategy.

10. The Ask

What are you raising, and how will you use the funds? Be clear about milestones this capital will help you achieve.

What are the most common pitch deck mistakes?

Too many slides (keep it under 15)
Walls of text instead of visuals
Unclear or jargon-heavy language
Missing contact information
Inconsistent design and branding
No clear ask or use of funds
Ignoring competition
Unrealistic financial projections
Forgetting to practice the verbal pitch

The Bigger Picture

Preparing your pitch deck is more than just creating slides—it’s a valuable exercise in clarifying your vision. The process forces you to articulate your story, understand your market, and anticipate tough questions.

But don’t stop at the slides. Your Q&A preparation deserves equal attention. Investors will probe deeper than your deck covers, and your ability to handle tough questions demonstrates your command of the business.

Want feedback on your pitch deck? Connect with me on LinkedIn or submit your company to FoundersEdge.

How Do You Pivot or Launch a Startup Product? A 10-Step Validation Framework

2024-02-21T00:00:00-05:00

The short version

The most expensive startup mistake is building a product before you’ve picked a specific customer and confirmed they’ll pay for it. This 10-step framework runs customer discovery, validation, and a soft launch in 6 to 8 weeks for under $1,000. Narrow your customer segment hard, validate the burning problem before you build, and charge early customers something, because payment is the only honest test of value.

When I heard people around me saying “I wish I was meditating,” “I wish I was exercising regularly,” it made me think… we have hundreds of thousands of apps for that, what’s missing?

After interviewing 50 individuals, I identified a consistent pattern—successful lifestyle changes happened when people had accountability partners. This insight led to Wishroute, an accountability-focused platform using text messaging for engagement.

The initial approach showed exceptional results: users texted back 3-4 days/week and stuck with us for years (10x+ better engagement retention than health & wellness apps). We scaled through partnerships with trainers and gyms, but faced collapse when COVID-19 eliminated gym operations.

That pivot taught me everything about launching and relaunching products. Here’s what I learned:

The #1 Mistake Founders Make

Building a product before they’ve honed in on a specific target customer persona and validated they’ll buy it.

Each customer segment has different needs—building for everyone means building for no one.

What’s the 10-step framework to validate before you build?

Phase 1: Customer Discovery (Days 1-7)

Step 1: Brainstorm Ideal Customer Personas (ICPs) Duration: 1-2 days

Identify multiple potential customer segments using your unique strengths and assets. Think about:

Who has the problem you want to solve?
Where do you have existing relationships or credibility?
What industries or personas align with your expertise?

Step 2: Conduct Quick Online Research Duration: 2-3 days

Evaluate each ICP on:

Market size and growth potential
Extension opportunities to adjacent markets
Difficulty of reaching this customer
Expected sales cycle length
Team alignment and passion

Step 3: Narrow to Top 1-3 ICPs Duration: 1 day

Meditate and reflect. Choose the most promising directions that balance opportunity size with your ability to win.

Phase 2: Validation (Weeks 2-3)

Step 4: Customer Discovery Interviews Duration: 1 week

Conduct 5-15 interviews per ICP. Focus on:

The problems they face (not your solution)
Past behaviors and attempts to solve the problem
Solutions they’ve tried and why they failed
How much they’d pay to solve this problem

Step 5: Select Primary ICP Duration: 1 day

Choose the segment with the most urgent, burning problem. For Wishroute, we discovered meditation apps with subscriptions were losing 70% of users within 3 days, costing $50+ per acquisition. This became our primary target because it represented a burning problem with revenue upside.

Phase 3: Development (Weeks 4-8)

Step 6: Design Solution Mockup Duration: 1 week

Create visual representations—wireframes or prototypes—without building the full product. Tools like Figma, Canva, or even PowerPoint work fine. The goal is to show, not ship.

Step 7: Get Mockup Feedback Duration: 1 week

Present ideas to ~15 customers matching your exact ICP persona. Watch for:

Genuine excitement vs. polite interest
Specific feature requests that reveal true needs
Willingness to pay or sign up for early access

Beware of founder happy-ears—the tendency to hear what you want rather than objective feedback.

Step 8: Develop V1 Roadmap Duration: 1 week

Create a minimum viable product roadmap based on customer insights. Cut ruthlessly. Your V1 should solve one core problem extremely well.

Step 9: Marketing & Business Model Duration: 2 weeks

While developing the product:

Build waitlists to capture demand
Test messaging and positioning
Validate pricing using the Van Westendorp model
Plan your initial distribution channels

Step 10: Soft Launch & Go Live Duration: Ongoing

Onboard early users, gather feedback, iterate, then expand to broader audiences.

Critical advice: Charge early customers something. That’s essential to validating that you’re solving a burning problem. Free users will use anything—paying customers prove real value.

Resources for Your Journey

Michael Seibel’s Y Combinator video on MVP planning
MaxDiff and Constant Sum surveys for feature prioritization
Van Westendorp Pricing Model for price validation
Product-Market Fit scoring frameworks to measure progress

The Bottom Line

This entire process costs under $1,000 and takes 6-8 weeks. Compare that to the alternative: months of building the wrong product, burning runway, and starting over.

Specificity matters. Narrow your customer segment dramatically. Validate before you build. And charge early—it’s the only true test of value.

Need help with your pivot or product launch? Connect with me on LinkedIn or reach out to FoundersEdge.

FoundersEdge Venture Capital

What Do You Tell Investors When Things Aren’t Going Well?

Four Reasons to Send the Update Anyway

1. Your investors might actually be able to help

2. Consistency builds trust

3. Your investors are learning through you

4. It raises your odds of success

So What Do You Actually Say?

10 Rules for Investor Updates When Things Aren’t Going Well

1. Keep the cadence

2. Put the bad news up top

3. Keep reporting the same KPIs

4. Separate facts from your assessment

5. Tell us what you’re doing next

6. Say “I don’t know” when that’s the case

7. Make specific asks

8. Share what you’re learning

9. If something is material, don’t wait for the next update

10. When you really don’t want to write it, send the minimum viable version

Yes, I’d Back a Founder Who Lost My Money

When the Updates Get Longer, Pay Attention

Think Beyond This Company

Do Solo Founders Really Underperform?

What the research says

The real variable

What we tell founders

References

Founder-Market Fit: Real Signal, or a Story We Tell Afterward?

What has support

Where it breaks down

How to use it

References

When to Pivot: What the Evidence Says About Timing

What the research points to

A usable test

References

Does Founder Age Predict Success?

What if the young founder is the exception?

But it’s genuinely contested

The outliers everyone remembers

What it means for founders and funds

References

The Second-Time Founder’s Edge

What the evidence supports

Where the edge is thinner than it looks

For first-time founders

References

Do You Need a Co-Founder? How to Decide, and How to Find the Right One

Do You Really Need a Co-Founder?

When a Co-Founder Matters Most

When a Co-Founder Might Not Be Necessary

Losing a Co-Founder? Here’s What to Do Next

Here’s my best advice for finding a new co-founder or key hire quickly:

What’s Worked

Investor Mindset: What I Look for at Pre-Seed

Final Thoughts

How Do You Validate a Startup Idea? The Metrics That Matter Before You Have Traction

Why do metrics matter before you have traction?

How to Operationalize Metrics in Your Startup

Early Metrics to Track Across 5 Common Assumptions

Assumption: Customers Have X Pain Point

Assumption: Product Solves Customer Pain Point

Assumption: We Can Reach Customers Profitably and Repeatedly

Assumption: We Have Enough Resources to Hit Key Milestones

Assumption: Our Team Can Execute Well Together

Example: From Idea to Traction — A Landscaping SaaS Startup

Step 1: Validate the Pain

Step 2: Validate the Solution Direction

Step 3: Test Your Go-to-Market

Step 4: Test Usage and Onboarding

Step 5: Early Revenue Traction

Investor POV: What We Actually Care About

What to Avoid

Final Thought

Do Investors Check Your LinkedIn? Here’s Exactly What They Look For

What do investors look for on your LinkedIn?

CEO/Founder Profile Assessment

Team Member Profiles

Company Profile Elements

Green Flags That Build Confidence