This past Saturday I got to sit on a panel with Jeff Paine (Golden Gate Ventures), Michael Blakey (Cocoon Capital), and Roy from Crane. It was one of those conversations where a bunch of threads come up that feel separate in the moment. But the more I sat with them afterward, the more I realized they were all circling the same thing.
The question we kept coming back to is the one every pre-seed founder wrestles with: how do you stand out when you’re pre-product, pre-revenue, pre-product-market-fit — pre-everything? What are VCs actually looking for when there’s nothing to look at yet?
Here’s where I landed. Every dimension we talked about — customer, team, vision, timing — is really a proxy for one thing: how deeply do you understand the problem you’re solving? At pre-seed, depth is the product. Let me break down what I mean.
Start with the customer
The lens I always come back to is the customer. Who is it, specifically? Not “SMBs” or “developers” — which SMB, which developer, and what does their day actually look like?
The founders who make me lean in are the ones who understand the shape of their customer’s problem in detail. They can tell you why it’s painful, why it’s painful now, and why their product solves it in a way that makes the customer thrilled to pay them — quickly. That last part matters. A lot of ideas are interesting. Fewer make someone open their wallet next week. If you understand your customer deeply enough, you can tell the difference.
You’re your own biggest investor
Roy took a quick poll of the room. How many of you would sell or mortgage your house to fund your startup? How many would sleep on couches to make it work? (Michael jumped in: please don’t sleep on a couch — I did that with my startup and it wrecked my health. Fair.)
The couch thing is a bit of a meme, but underneath it is a real question. Set aside what investors think of your idea for a second. How much conviction do you actually have?
You are your startup’s biggest investor. I get to hold a portfolio of bets. You don’t. You’ve got one. So the question you have to answer for yourself — before anyone writes you a check — is whether this is worth the opportunity cost of everything else you could be doing with your time and your life.
I want to be careful here, because I’m not talking about blind conviction. Blind conviction is how people spend five years on something the market kept telling them to quit. What I’m looking for is reasoned conviction — you’ve looked hard at the thing, you understand the risks, and you still want to double down. What gives you the grounds to make that bet? If you can answer that clearly, it usually shows.
Sell the future, not yourself
Michael made the point that founders — especially in this part of the world — should be more American about it and sell themselves harder. There’s truth in that. But I think it slightly misses where the energy should go.
Yes, you have to answer “why you?” — why do you have the right to win here? But the more powerful thing isn’t selling yourself. It’s selling a vision of the future. What does the world look like if you’re right? Why is that different from today? What are the tailwinds already pushing that future into being — and what can you see about it that isn’t obvious to someone who hasn’t lived inside this problem the way you have?
When a founder can do that, they’re not really asking me to believe in them. They’re helping me see what they see. That’s a much easier yes.
The move almost nobody makes: study the history
This is the meta piece I kept trying to name during the panel, and I think it’s the one most founders skip.
A lot of people decide they want to start a company without ever studying the history of the problem they’re trying to solve. And problems have history. The same underlying problem shows up across decades, and gets solved different ways by whatever technology happens to be available at the time. Market structures rhyme. Types of buyers rhyme.
If you don’t understand that, your picture of the problem is incomplete — and it shows the moment someone pushes on “why now, why you, why this.” People usually study the technology history, or the product history. Fewer study the business history: who the buyer is, how they’ve bought before, why past attempts won or died. That’s the part that actually tells you whether your wedge works. Spend time there.
Staying close to the frontier
One thing we talked about is how Southeast Asia often runs about a year behind the frontier you’d feel in the Bay Area. I don’t think that’s a horsepower problem — there’s no shortage of smart, capable people here. It’s an exposure problem. Folks just aren’t in the same rooms, hearing the same conversations, so progress moves at a different pace.
So how do you close that gap? One way is the obvious one: go spend real time in San Francisco. The other, which is available to anyone, is to study what builders are actually shipping in public. And I’d stress builders — not the people talking about AI, the people building with it. Watch what they do, not what they say. Get into the details. Right now the rate of building is so fast that the only way to know where the frontier really is, is to look closely at what’s being made.
The through-line
If you zoom out, none of this is really about pitching. It’s about understanding. The customer, your own conviction, the future you’re betting on, the history that got us here — a good pitch is just what it looks like when you understand all four more completely than anyone else in the room.
So before your next pitch, don’t polish the deck first. Go deeper on the problem. The selling takes care of itself when you’re the one who understands it best.