The Best of Founder/Investor/Expert Q&A #3
Jock Fairweather ??
I help founders uncover their early believers and turn them into incredible advocates.
Hi team,
Here's a snippet from the Community VC ecosystem of who said what between experts/investors and startup founders and why it’s worth reading.
?If you want to see more of the conversations that happen within our ecosystem - you can take part, learn and join hundreds of others in our community forums here: https://community-vc.com/join/?
??? Before we jump into it, welcome to the 26 new forum supporters and 16?new founders who joined our community!
???Special welcome to our newest founder forum participant Prashant Parulekar from Infigolabs to our Deeptech Community.
Lastly, a cheeky share on our new pages going live next week!
Forum page: https://community-vc.com/forums/
?Why read the Q&A from this week?
?Aetherlab is building an incredibly complex business and sometimes struggles to cut through with their explanations/deck.
How do you balance story telling with the hard-facts that can cut through for an ask as big as $5m for a Seed round?
?
????The Ask??
?
Founder:
Alex Georges | https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/alexander-georges/
?
Company:
AetherLab | https://aetherlab.co
?
Tagline:
Bringing AI guardrails, trust, clarity, and control to the AI revolution
?
Sector:
AI | SaaS | Risk Management
?
Stage:
$5M seed raise
?
?? Ask:
Insight on Go-to-Market traction expectations for seed rounds
?
? Question:
This seems like a higher bar than normal for a seed round—is it common for VCs to turn away early deals for lacking signed B2B clients?? To be clear, we do have significant traction (a few high-impact clients in proposal stage) but no revenue from them yet.
Could our $5M raise amount be setting this higher bar? Or is this a reflection of today’s funding landscape? It feels like…
?
Additional Info:
Pitch Deck: (only for forum members)
?
Find more of this founder through this forum: https://chat.whatsapp.com/CuJ74uVi546H8cLJNNZ3Sg
????The Q&A?
@Will Rosewarne | https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/willrosewarne/
What do you mean by proposal stage? Have you just pitched or are you in the process of closing?
?
@Andrew Scott | https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/andrewescott/
"is it common for VCs to turn away early deals for lacking signed B2B clients?" It depends, e.g. on the company and the VC. Revenue is a great signal that you are solving a problem that customers are feeling pain around. If a VC doesn't immediately see that you are solving a painful problem, they may instead look for traction metrics like revenue for evidence of this. Could this apply to you? Are there other ways for you to make it super obvious that you are solving a widespread and painful problem?
The slide showing Jenna and Taylor is attention-grabbing, but it might also reinforce that the companies (i.e. your potential customers) who didn't manage AI guardrails well are still doing alright, e.g. OpenAI, Trump campaign, Twitter/X. Ideally you'd want to be able to say something like "Don't be the next cautionary tale".
?
@Dan Martin | https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/danielmgill/
On your question, I’d think $5mill may be seen as too trivial an ask. It begs the question, if you can develop this with $5m, what’s stopping other bigger players from entering this space??
On the presentation, think it makes sense to a) bring the news articles to the second slide so that your assertion that “ai is running rampant” has been validated, and isn’t just on your say so, and b) if consider a more demure pic of Jenna given the audience and the context.
I’d be tempted to cold open with a fresh deep fake video that seems plausible enough, to really set the tone of how easily ai can manipulate everyday people today
?
Peter Tippet: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/petertippett/
The deck has too many logos with nothing backing them up so will create distrust when compared to having only 1 B2B client in testing.
Also, who’s LLM are you using or are you creating your own as that has cost and currently everyone to fighting for that resource. Many are working n tis, why will you win.
Your current test results is what is key as pre traction in real terms and is buried away.
In summary this feels like a marketing deck, not an investor pitch deck and takes a while to get into it as working on setting context. What would make them take notice is the results you are getting and what you need money for is to scale this.
Use of funds, salaries is the wrong one to have, it should be product, engineering, sales, support and server costs. Salaries is a given in those sections.
?
Don’t hesitate on the question and inquiry front:
Join the community and sign up to any forum as a supporter or a founder through this link: https://community-vc.com/join/?
As the community a question through this link: https://community-vc.com/ask-a-question/?
Jock & the team