automate the motion or change it

this morning i had a debrief with a founder building ai for car buyers. he's about two weeks from closing a round, and he said something i keep hearing in different words from different people... i was trying to save costs and ended up paying ten times more.

he meant awareness. he never built the relationships with investors before he needed them. so now every meeting starts cold, and the clock is loud.

and he's not alone. most founders go to investors when they need money. by then you.re already on the back foot, because need is the one thing everyone on the other side of the table can smell.

meanwhile a lot of money is going into fixing sales with ai. one of the louder bets this year is monaco, started by a former founders fund partner. it gives a startup an ai native crm with the prospects already loaded, and real salespeople watching over the machine. smart team, serious backers.

but look at what it automates. find the list, write the email, book the meeting, log the notes. it's the old motion, run faster.

faster was never the problem. when every founder can send ten times the email, every inbox gets ten times the asks. the cost of asking drops toward zero, and so do the replies.

so the question i ask isn't how do i automate the pitch. it's how do i stop pitching.

that's what the show does for me. i don't email an investor asking for a meeting. i invite them to talk about what they've learned. they say yes because it's about them. they prep, they share it with their own people, and by the debrief we're two people who already spent half an hour together.

earlier that same morning i taped with an investor at one of the most active early stage funds in europe. i didn't pitch her a thing. so when i told this founder i.d make a few warm intros once his deck was ready, i wasn't begging for a favour. the relationship was already there.

a couple of years ago my back went out and i was stuck on the floor for a week. i had to cancel a trip to india. the book that fixed it taught me one idea i still think about. your spine isn't a rigid tower. it's more like one of those tall thin masts held up by wires on every side, and the wires are your core. you don't build the core the day it breaks. you do the boring exercises every day so it doesn't.

relationships are the core of a raise. a handful of investor conversations every single day, because you have a real reason to have them... after a year the round is a few messages, not a campaign.

automation makes the old motion cheaper. changing the motion makes most of it unnecessary. and you can do both. let the software run the logistics and keep yourself in the conversation.

if you want to see what that looks like, every one of those conversations lives on the show.

so if you had to raise in the next two weeks... who would you call that already knows you?