Getting the first check: Perfecting your "team with a dream" pitch

How to make your team and startup truly stand out at the earliest stages

The best founders I've backed weren't the ones with the most polished pitch decks or the most impressive resumes. They weren’t the well-rounded professionals with a bunch of accolades; instead, they were the obsessive product thinkers, the repeat builders, the 10x engineers, the behavioral psychologists, the hackers, and the social media savants. They were statistical outliers: humans so extraordinarily spiky in one or two dimensions that they could fundamentally reshape markets.

So what does it actually take to stand out? After evaluating thousands of pitches, I’ve distilled my evaluation framework into a three-legged stool. Note these are my personal views from my experience, and not indicative of a16z as a firm or the broader ecosystem. Every investor out there will have different tastes, theses, and tactics, but this should be helpful as a general framework.

And if you’re a pre-seed / seed stage company, consider applying to a16z speedrun! Applications close this Sunday May 11th; if you’re reading this now you can list me as a referral (Robin Guo, Substack).

Republished with edits

Here are the three pillars:

1. Team

2. Metrics

3. Market (and product)

Nice little Ghibli chair

Ideally, you excel in all three: a killer team with strong founder-market fit pursuing a massive opportunity, with early validation that your product resonates. Short of that trifecta, you should be remarkably spiky in at least one or two dimensions. Underlying these three principles is something equally crucial: storytelling ability. At its core, fundraising means convincing investors to believe in you, your vision, and your creation. The more compelling your narrative, the smoother your fundraise will go.

Let’s dive in.

Team

How many legends can you name

Everyone says team is important, but what does that actually mean? Investors are hunting for statistical outliers—three or four sigma humans with the clear potential to create outlier outcomes. Your job is to demonstrate that you're one of these rare, spiky people. This can manifest in many forms, but here are some signals that consistently stand out:

1. You build constantly, even without permission. Your GitHub is littered with side projects. Your weekends disappear into hackathons. You've repeatedly gone from 0:1 on projects, not because someone assigned them, but because you couldn't help yourself. Getting from 0:1 is fundamentally different from scaling 1:100, and I need to see you can do the former before worrying about the latter.

2. You possess a specific, unfair advantage. You've deliberately focused your skill points in areas that give you a unique edge. Maybe it's technical knowledge others don't have, customer insights from deep industry experience, or access to a network nobody else can tap. Maybe it’s IOI or IMO medals, or groundbreaking research papers. The question that should have a compelling answer: Why and how will you win when others start competing against you?

3. You have obsessive depth in a weird niche. Maybe you built a TikTok following explaining AI, went all-in on an obscure crypto protocol in 2014, reached grandmaster in competitive Starcraft, or spend weekends building custom drones. This matters for two reasons: First, you've demonstrated the ability to go unreasonably deep, essentially getting a "PhD" in something you care about. Second, these seemingly random niches often become tomorrow's innovation frontier. For instance, GPUs were "just for gamers" until they powered the entire AI revolution.

4. You're a talent magnet. Great people instinctively want to work with you. Can you convince exceptional people to join your mission? Can you recruit folks with more experience or credentials than you have? If you naturally attract top talent, you'll likely attract capital too, these abilities are strongly correlated and at the basis of both is convincing other humans to believe in you and your vision.

5. You have skin in the game. The best founders have made genuine sacrifices to build their company, quitting cushy jobs, moving cities, or surviving on fumes when the going gets tough. VCs notice when you've got nothing to fall back on because it signals true conviction. Those who've hedged their bets by keeping side gigs or consultant roles often lack the necessary focus and desperation to drive breakthroughs.

6. You’re fast. A team that ships weekly will outperform a team with perfect credentials who ships quarterly. When evaluating founding teams, I'm constantly looking for evidence of extraordinary speed: how quickly you built your MVP, how rapidly you iterate, and how decisively you make decisions.

7. You’re intellectually honest. Ideally, I’d like to see that you can publicly admit when you're wrong, acknowledge uncertainty, and update your thinking with new evidence. You should be confident of course, but also incorporate new data from the world to make better decisions.

Boiling it down, this is really about talent + idea + agency. You've got a unique skillset, a killer idea, and the drive to execute relentlessly. The traits I've outlined above are indicators of these three fundamentals. But let's get tactical about what your founding team should actually look like:

• Solo founders need to be full-stack builders. If you're going it alone, you can't afford to be blocked on anything. You need to build, sell, recruit, and fundraise, all simultaneously. The main advantage, however, is that you've got more equity to dangle in front of key early hires who are missionary about your goals.

• Co-founding teams with complementary skills. Look at your collective capabilities like a puzzle. Are there any glaringly obvious pieces missing? Whether it's technical chops, design sensibility, distribution know-how, or hiring skills, make sure your core team covers as many of the critical bases as possible.

• Proven working relationships matter more than you think. Co-founder breakups kill more startups than anything else. When things get tough, and they will, you need absolute, unshakeable trust in your partners. Previous battles fought together are the best predictor of surviving future ones.

• Your references need to be locked and loaded. I'll spend hours getting to know you, but the best folks to chat with are those who’ve worked with you in the trenches. Good VCs will do both front-door and back-channel reference checks. Prep your references thoroughly and make sure they understand what VCs are evaluating and can speak to your specific strengths.

Final thought on team: the pitches that always get me excited are the ones where my information gain per minute is extremely high. Convey what unique insight you bring that explains why you – specifically you – will win in the market you’re going after.

Metrics

I’m not going to rehash all benchmarks and goals for B2C and B2B companies since my colleagues have written about it extensively (B2B, social, marketplaces, growth). Instead, let's focus on getting early signal before you have booked revenue or a large cohort of DAUs. And by the way, the best thing you can do if VCs say no is to keep building and improve the business. Marc’s article two decades ago rings true today too.

So pre-revenue what do you look for:

• User engagement. Are your family and friend testers actually using this thing? Is your Discord with a hundred users constantly buzzing with product feedback? Even without traditional retention metrics, you need to get a read on how users react to your product. Look at concrete indicators: are they sharing it unprompted? How emotional do they get when discussing features? How many messages are they sending about it?

  • For B2B products, this typically means having a few design partners who genuinely love what you're building and are ready to convert to paying customers once it's production-ready. User love matters regardless of whether you're selling to enterprises or consumers.

  • If you're building with LLMs, run sentiment analysis on your Discord, Reddit threads, or sales calls. I personally dig through review pages and early community forums to see the raw, unfiltered reactions.

  • In particular, when users encounter bugs or downtime, do they get frustrated or just shrug? The best products create emotional dependence. If users are genuinely upset when features break or respond with "when will this be fixed?!" that’s gold.

• Marketing/waitlist metrics. Maybe your product isn't fully baked, but you can make the idea catch fire. This alone can be valuable since it demonstrates two things: potential market interest and your ability to cut through the noise with distribution.

Until you have hard metrics, you're sifting through fuzzy signals trying to find truth. Most people default to being nice, so users won't tell you how they actually feel until you detect it in their actions or unconscious behavior.

Market (and Product)

I've watched countless startups pivot multiple times over the course of their journey, and smart founders usually have good instincts about which markets can support big businesses and rotate the business toward that opportunity. While having UX mocks or an early demo makes things tangible, what matters more is your depth of thought about what you're building and why.

Some market considerations that should be in your pitch:

• Market definition and scope. Frame it at the largest defensible size. Uber wasn't just black cars - it was revolutionizing transportation globally. Airbnb wasn’t just blowup mattresses in a room - it was revolutionizing the travel industry.

• The "Why Now?" question. This breaks into two scenarios:

  • Some ideas are obviously good but fiercely competitive. Look at the mobile/web vibecoding space: Lovable, Bolt, Replit, and dozens more are all fighting for position. What's your specific edge?

  • Or if you're tackling an older market, what's changed? What technological unlock or timing advantage lets you succeed where others failed? If you're building another marketplace for trading cards or pet services, you need a compelling reason why this time is different.

• Path to monopoly. How will you dominate long-term? What moats are you building that keep competitors at bay? Network effects? Workflow lock-ins? Data advantages? Something needs to create compounding value that makes your product more compelling as you scale.

• Category creation vs. disruption. Are you creating a new category or disrupting an existing one? Each approach has different requirements and challenges. If you're creating a category, focus on the "from → to" transition you enable. If disrupting, show why your 10x better approach matters.

• Initial go-to-market. Who are your day one customers and what's your core ICP? This needs to be razor-sharp, with deep understanding of their behaviors, pain points, and willingness to pay.

• Map of the decision-maker, buyer, and user ecosystem. Especially for B2B, understand who makes decisions, who controls budget, and who actually uses your product. Markets where these align (same person) have faster adoption cycles than those with complex procurement.

For the product itself, I’m really evaluating it as a reflection of your team. How quickly did you build it? (evidence of velocity) Even if it's rough around the edges, does it show taste? Does the product embody your unique market insight (evidence of thought)? Later on, product will matter more but at the earlier stages it’s more of a reflection of the team.

Conclusion

At a16z speedrun, we back founders at the earliest stages who embody many of these principles: who are spiky, fast-moving, and taking a swing at big ambitious ideas. The application deadline is approaching this Sunday, but whether you apply with us or pitch elsewhere, I hope you found this essay helpful. Application here! Feel free to add me as a referral (Robin Guo, substack).

And if you need more help, I’ve written other essays such as 5 tips for fundraising in a bear market. Hope this was useful!