# Raising early money, from first meeting to monthly update — Summary The Consumer VC work group answers early fundraising questions in group chats. Members cover first meetings, decks and pre-seed rounds, and what to send backers once the money is in. Updated: 2026-10-13 HTML page: [Raising early money, from first meeting to monthly update]() Transcript: [Full Chat Transcript]() Work group: [Consumer VC]() ## Questions ### [Running a first meeting with a seed investor]() Spend the meeting on the customer, the product and the behavior behind your numbers, and leave room for a candid exchange about what is weak. - **Start with how the customer is changing.** Kirsten Green wants to hear the shift in the customer and why the product fits it now, then see a product, a test and an early sign that customers care. Alfred Lin ties why the company will matter in ten years to a customer problem the founder can describe in detail. - **Explain the behavior behind your numbers.** Niko Bonatsos asks who uses the product and how often they return; five million downloads say little if only 10% use the app. Josh Elman suggests one or two user stories and a measure of real use, like Twitter's count of people who visited at least seven times a month. - **Show the product and the decisions behind it.** Nabeel Hyatt learns more about a founder's judgment from what a user experiences and a choice the team made than from a market-size slide. Josh adds the story of a user who left, came back, and what the team changed because of it. - **Use the meeting to judge the investor.** Alfred tells founders to show weak data next to strong data, ask what needs work, and watch how the investor responds to decide whether they would be a steady partner when things go badly. ### [Hard questions from a first investor meeting, with answers]() Each question asks for evidence a founder can name: a market change, a customer who changed behavior, a cohort that returns, or a milestone this round can test. - **Why will this company matter in 10 years?** Alfred Lin borrows Don Valentine's question. At seed, a specific change in the market, and why the team can act on it now, can carry the answer when company metrics are sparse. He also asks for your worst reference and why. - **Why does the customer change what they do?** Kirsten Green asks what changed for a specific customer and what early behavior shows the idea is landing. Josh Elman asks what the team changed after watching users struggle, as Twitter did when it changed onboarding around finding people to follow. - **Who comes back, and why?** Niko Bonatsos wants the cohort, its time period and its repeat-use rate, with discounts counted alongside ad spend. With few users, Josh would start from one person's path, then give the count for everyone who followed it, including those who left. - **What does this round pay for?** Niko wants the customer group, the work the money funds and why now. Nabeel Hyatt asks what result would amaze the founder a year out, then which belief this round can test on the way there. ### [How seed investors want an early pitch deck built]() A deck carries one story; most of the group gets to the product early and keeps market claims specific enough to check. - **Tell one story.** Josh Elman uses five parts: the problem, the solution, who has the problem and why they will adopt, why this team now, and the raise. Kirsten Green builds it as the shift, the wedge and the layers, so the big vision reads as a sequence. - **Reach the product fast and name the risks.** Nabeel Hyatt has founders write the 18-month story first, get to the product early because it holds the founder's best thinking, and put the risks in the deck. He would rather earn one strong yes than a stack of lukewarm interest. - **A market the reader can check.** Alfred Lin says the market sets how big a company can get, so the team slide can't carry the whole decision. For technical founders, Niko Bonatsos opens with the demo and the founder's own pain, keeps market size small and checkable, and wants a why-now that names a specific enabler. - **Put the business model third.** For a consumer company with a working demo, Kirsten's order is the shift, the demo, the business model, evidence of behavior, the layers, what can't be copied, then team, risks and the raise. The model goes third because it decides whether the demo is fundable. ### [What seed investors judge before a startup has traction]() With little data, the group judges the founders' insight and resilience, whether the idea would spread between friends, and whether a few users keep coming back. - **Insight first, then resilience.** Alfred Lin weighs a founder's insight before their conviction. Sequoia backed NVIDIA before there was a GPU category because someone who had watched Jensen solve hard problems vouched for him, and passed on DoorDash after underweighting the founders' resilience. - **The founder lives the problem.** Niko Bonatsos looks for founders who are customers of their own product, like Saturn's, who found it easier to schedule a call with colleagues than dinner with friends. He also asks what new technology makes the idea possible now. - **The idea passes a social test.** Josh Elman asks whether someone explaining the idea to a friend would make both of them want to use it. He weighs a team that is hungry to iterate more heavily; Discord and Musical.ly both started as different products. - **Small, real numbers and room to grow.** Niko would rather see a few users who return on their own than a big download count; he has seen 5 million downloads where only 10% used the app. Kirsten Green wants a model that can scale, and Nabeel Hyatt asks whether the market can grow rather than how big the TAM slide is today. ### [How a pre-seed round runs, from first meeting to money in the bank]() Pick one lead, size the round from the milestones it has to reach, and keep the open part of the raise short. - **One lead, one instrument, one cap.** Niko Bonatsos sees founders stack SAFEs at different caps until nobody can say what they own, which hurts hiring. Mike Duboe names two ways a no-lead rolling round breaks: nobody owns the company's problems, and the founder ends up raising the whole time. - **Size the round from inputs.** Alfred Lin lists the experiments, hires and milestones that retire the biggest risks, costs them and adds a buffer; Romotive's thin seed made its early years harder. Mike ties the budget to a strict milestone such as repeat use in a defined cohort. Alfred treats the cap as the number that matters least. - **SAFE or priced round.** Nabeel Hyatt says the legal-cost gap between SAFEs and priced rounds has mostly closed, and he often prefers pricing. Niko would push for a priced round when a lead writes most of the check, senior hires are coming or small checks will keep arriving, and keep a SAFE for a small, quick round. - **Keep the open window short.** Niko tells founders to run parallel conversations in a tight window, since a round that drips along for four months looks like a pass. Nabeel warns that fake urgency backfires. Kirsten Green tells founders to learn which themes a firm tracks before the first meeting, because a pass often means the company didn't fit its thesis. ### [What an accelerator application needs to show]() Show why this team has to build this, let the reviewer use the product, and report a completed learning cycle with honest numbers. - **Why this team, and why now.** Niko Bonatsos wants the specific user and pain, and what the founders built because they understand it. Anish Acharya asks for the team's edge, what it knows that others miss and why the timing works. Kirsten Green looks for a consumer insight in plain language, and Alfred Lin for why the company will matter in ten years. - **Put the product in the application.** Nabeel Hyatt wants a link or a short demo, what users can now do that they couldn't before, and the biggest risk with the evidence that you can solve it. If the team changed direction, he suggests a few lines on what changed its mind. - **Numbers that survive a follow-up question.** Niko asks for active and retained users with the cohort and time window, discounts counted in acquisition cost, and an LOI called an LOI. - **Before retention, show a learning cycle.** Anish gives the most weight to a working product, the users who tried it, what they did and a change the team shipped as a result, with dates and a user count. Alfred adds a weak metric alongside the plan to learn from it. ### [What seed investors want in a monthly update]() Open with runway and a few consistent metrics, say why each one matters, close the loop on last month's tests, and end with asks an investor can act on. - **Health first, asks last.** Alfred Lin models his structure on Summer Health's update: runway, 3 to 6 metrics with month-over-month change, wins and setbacks, people, next month's milestones, and two or three specific asks. - **Count core users and explain the metric.** Josh Elman centers the update on people who did the core action at its natural frequency, like Twitter's seven visits a month, and adds a line on why that metric predicts value and whether its definition changed. - **Report tests and acquisition quality.** Mike Duboe suggests a small table of hypothesis, test, threshold, result and decision, drawn from Stitch Fix's experiment one-pagers, and checks whether paid acquisition is masking weak retention. - **Name the risk and the cash commitments.** Nabeel Hyatt gives the biggest unresolved risk its own line near the top. Kirsten Green wants gross margin, repeat purchase, and the cash the next inventory order commits before it sells, or the next fixed growth commitment for a company without inventory. ## Participants - [Kirsten Green]() — Founder and Managing Partner of Forerunner. Board member at Glossier - [Alfred Lin]() — Partner at Sequoia Capital. Former Chairman and COO of Zappos - [Nabeel Hyatt]() — EIR and former General Partner at Spark Capital. Board observer at Discord - [Niko Bonatsos]() — Founder of Verdict Capital. Former Managing Director at General Catalyst - [Josh Elman]() — Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Founded the growth team at Twitter - [Mike Duboe]() — General Partner at Greylock. Former Head of Growth at Stitch Fix - [Anish Acharya]() — General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Former VP Product Management at Credit Karma --- Copyright © 2026 Super Me Network, Inc. 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