eighteen out of twenty

wednesday afternoon i had a debrief with a guest who has spent a long career around venture, building companies and helping a lot of funds.

i was going to walk him through how we work. he got there before i did.

he said startups don't usually die because the idea was bad or the team was weak. they die at go to market. then he gave me his own numbers.

out of 20 investments, typically only 1 will return... really well... one may return breakeven. 18 will fail.

eighteen write offs out of twenty. from someone who has seen the inside of a lot of portfolios.

and the one that works, he said, almost always nailed the same things. exactly who they sell to. how they say it. how they reach those people.

sit with that for a second, because it isn't how most founders spend their week.

look at where the hours go in an early company. the product. the next feature. the deck. the brand. the hiring plan. go to market gets whatever's left on friday afternoon, and it usually means the founder sending a few cold emails and hoping.

then the company runs out of money with a product that works.

that's the quiet tragedy in his numbers. a lot of those eighteen built something real. they just never got in front of enough of the right people, fast enough, before the runway ended.

here's how i think about it now.

building is close to free. anyone can build almost anything with ai in a weekend. so the product isn't the scarce part anymore. the scarce part is attention. the right buyer, the right investor, the right partner, in a real conversation with you.

and most founders chase that attention backwards. they walk up to strangers and say i'm awesome, buy my thing, or give me money. a stranger owes you nothing. so they say no, or they say nothing.

flip it. go to the same person and say you're awesome, i want to tell your story. invite them onto a show. spotlight them. now you're giving first. the yes rate changes completely, and the conversation that follows is between two people, not a pitcher and a target.

and a podcast is just one shape of it. a roundtable, an industry report where you quote people, a fireside chat. you don't need to be a famous host. you need to be the one handing out the spotlight.

the debrief itself was proof. he'd been on the show, liked the prep, and was asking how it works before i pitched anything. that's what giving first looks like from the other side.

i told him what we see with funds. a podcast invite doesn't die with the junior screener. it goes up the chain, because senior people like being asked about their work.

none of this means your product doesn't matter. it means the product is the ticket to the game, not the game.

if you're early, here's the test. how many hours last week did you spend in real conversations with the exact people you need... buyers, investors, partners? not building for them. talking to them.

if that number is small, his eighteen out of twenty are your odds.

long term, i think go to market becomes most of the founder's job. the agents will build. the founder will sell, raise and partner. the ones who start practicing now get a head start that's hard to catch.

if you want to see how we turn invitations into a full calendar, here's the engine.

so what's your number... how many real conversations with buyers did you have last week?