Venture Capital & Fundraising

At the earliest stages investors back the team, not the idea. Renana Ashkenazi of Grove Ventures calls the team the single most important ingredient, because the market, the competition and the technology are still unknown and keep shifting. She looks for people who are energized rather than paralyzed by chaos, and who can make hard calls without all the data.

Aviad Harel of Team8 breaks it into three hats a founding team must cover: technology, product and go-to-market, whether in one person or three. Above all he wants founder-market fit, a deep familiarity with the domain that produces real intuitions. Navot Volk of GroundUp prefers teams over solo founders, people who live the problem and understand why others failed at it.

Nicole Priel, speaking during her time at Ibex Investors, put it this way: she backs founders with no alternative, who would build the company in any macro climate, not wannabes chasing the next-Zuckerberg story.

A good idea isn't enough; investors want to know why now. Navot Volk argues that almost every idea has already been thought of, so what separates a real opportunity is timing: a shift in technology, market, user behavior or the cost of building. In his words, there are no bad ideas, only the wrong time.

Team8 builds the thesis before there is a company. Aviad Harel explains that a good thesis has to pass through three worlds, the problem, the solution and go-to-market, and that theses come in two kinds: solving an identified problem, which is systematic work, or predicting a new future, a longer play with huge upside. Now that building is cheap and fast, the hard part is knowing what to build, for whom, and why now.

Nicole Priel of Kinetic Capital makes the Why now case for consumer: low capital requirements, high scalability and a short path to revenue, riding the AI wave. She also argues you don't need to be first to market, and that it can even hurt, since early players educate the market and the next entrant arrives at a better point in the hype cycle.

The bar for raising has gone up: investors expect evidence, not just a deck. Aviad Harel sees founders arriving with a working prototype at the very first meeting, and notes that if you can build fast, you're also expected to show traction and revenue fast. Navot Volk expects founders to do everything possible without money first: research, user conversations and design partners.

Renana Ashkenazi audits the quality of market validation, not just its conclusions. She asks who you spoke with, which types of companies and personas, what you asked and how, and she even prefers there be no working product yet, so she knows the research was real. Nicole Priel, during her Ibex days, suggested two cheap ways to validate: a landing page with a few hundred dollars of ads and a deliberately high-friction form, or an expert network to reach hard-to-get customers.

In heavier sectors the bar is higher still. Talor Zaks of eHealth Ventures says the era of investing in dreams is over, and that most US funds won't take the meeting before roughly $2 million in revenue.