Insights
Observations from the investor side of the table — on founder narratives, deck structure, and the signals VCs use to evaluate pitches in partnership meetings.
12 June 2026
Series C+ deal value collapsed from $29bn in 2021 to $4.4bn in 2026 — SoftBank went from 14 new India deals to zero, Tiger Global from 212 to 9. This isn't a cycle. The growth-stage capital layer that manufactured India's unicorns has structurally exited, and Series B/C are now acting as pre-IPO rounds to compensate.
31 May 2026
Top VCs receive 200+ decks a month and respond to maybe 5 — but most of the other 195 never get evaluated at all. They're filtered out before a single partner reads a slide, almost always because of investor-fit failure or a deck that loses them in the first 90 seconds.
31 May 2026
VC and PE aren't just different fund sizes — they're different theories of value creation entirely. VCs are underwriting power law outcomes on founders and ideas; PE is underwriting operational improvement and increased scale on existing cashflows. A founder pitching a VC on margin stability, or pitching PE on TAM expansion, is speaking to the wrong instinct.
31 May 2026
Family offices, sovereign funds, and CVCs each operate with fundamentally different return expectations and strategic motivations — a CVC like Hyundai or Flipkart Ventures is rarely optimising for IRR the way a VC is. Pitching them identically is one of the more common and costly mistakes founders make.
31 May 2026
VCs are not evaluating your deck — they're evaluating whether you have the right to win, in a market that's ready now, with a business that can grow non-linearly. Most founders address the first layer of each question but stop before the part that actually moves a partnership decision.
31 May 2026
A $40m fund, 20 bets, 2 expected winners, 5% residual equity after dilution — the arithmetic forces every early-stage VC to need a $1bn outcome per winner. That's not ambition. That's fund mechanics, and your market size slide either clears this bar or quietly disqualifies you.
31 May 2026
Founders spend weeks perfecting slide design and TAM math while VCs are running a completely different evaluation — one most pitch decks never directly address. The questions aren't about the idea; they're about whether this team compounds under pressure, whether anyone will actually pay, and what kills this in 12 months.
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