The Questions VCs Ask Ourselves After a Pitch

When I spoke to future founders and VCs at Columbia Business School recently, this slide is when all the phones came out:

It’s a snapshot of the types of questions I’ve been asking founders when we’re trying to decide if Founder Collective is the right partner for their business.

Of course, it’s not comprehensive. But a founder who’s all over it should have tight answers for all of these and more…

💙 Incumbent/Upstart?

Are you in a better position than Amazon/Google/Meta/etc to solve this problem? Sell me on why users need David over Goliath.

🧬 Are these the right founders?

What about you/your experience gave you a unique insight? Are you commercially savvy and thoughtful about GTM? Are you incentivized to stay obsessed with this problem for the long haul? (We’re essentially getting married, after all!)

🪄 Is it hypothetical?

We’re in the era of “fill in the blank” pitches: AI for XYZ. Sometimes AI has enabled a real paradigm shift. Other times, the idea is “solving” a theoretical downstream implication that might happen if a dozen other factors line up too. Every time I hear the phrase “orchestration layer,” I squint a little harder…

(FWIW, I get this impulse – I thought the same way during the dot com era when I built my first startup. We thought the internet was the insight, when really it was the toolkit.)

Disclaimer: of course, this slide isn’t comprehensive! There are many more specific questions we dig into that aren’t shown here — for example, is your traction beta budgets or durable revenue? — but these are some of the broad strokes.

What’s missing? Has AI fever made certain questions more important? Less? Would love to hear how others are thinking about this.