For founders
For foundersThe work between a real business and a fundable one is specific, and most founders are asked to do it alone, in the middle of running the company, having never done it before.
The same failures recur, and almost none of them are the business.
Someone told you what a company like yours is worth, or you worked back from how much you need and how much you are willing to give away. Neither survives an investor who knows the sector. A valuation has to be defensible with stage, comparables, traction, market, and raise logic, and if it is not, the first serious meeting is where you find out.
A large market multiplied by an assumed share is the most common single failure in a deck, and experienced investors read it as a signal about everything else. The credible version is built bottom-up per segment, and it is usually a smaller headline number that is worth far more.
The deck says one revenue figure, the model says another, the memo uses a third. Each was written at a different time and never reconciled. An investor who finds it stops trusting all three, and reasonably so.
A number and a percentage is not a round. Instrument, minimum ticket, allocation, what the money buys, which milestone it reaches, and what the next round looks like from there: without those, an interested investor has nothing to say yes to.
Whatever exists. A deck, a model, a data folder, or a conversation and some spreadsheets. There is no prerequisite, and a thin starting position is not a disqualification. Pretending otherwise is.
A written diagnosis against the surface investors check, including the parts you will not enjoy reading. You get this before any decision about working together, because it is the only honest basis for one.
The investment case, the market work, the model, the memo, then the valuation with its comparable set. If the number you arrived with does not hold, we say so, correct it, and defend the corrected one.
Instrument, allocation, dilution, direct or pooled. Then targeting, outreach, meetings, diligence, and the pipeline, reported to you as it is, not as you would prefer it to be.
The complete set an institutional investor expects, built in sequence, every document carrying the same numbers because they are generated from the same defended case.