thirty days before the check... what coachable founder means

every founder has been told they need to be coachable. almost nobody has been told what it means.

friday i taped with an investor who has an answer, and better than that, a way to test it.

he spent years as a cmo at consumer finance companies. he made more than twenty angel investments before he raised a fund. and somewhere around turning fifty, something shifted for him.

writing checks on pedigree, or on spreadsheet analysis, kept leaving gaps. the things that sank companies didn't show up in the data. a founder's insecurities. a founder's aspirations. how they behave when the plan breaks.

there's no spreadsheet for that. there's no inference for that. you just have to kind of do it.

so his firm coaches first and invests second.

before any check, there's a thirty day process of working together. real work, on the real business. and the whole point is to leave room to say no.

they use it. he told me they pass on forty percent of the founders who finish.

we pass on 40% of the people now that finish the 30-day process

and they don't send a two line pass. they write long ones, explaining why.

think about how different that is from the way most rounds happen. a few meetings, a partner meeting, a term sheet, and then you find out who your investor is for the next ten years. his process flips it. you find out first.

so what is coachable, by his definition?

yeah, action-oriented self-awareness. like, do you understand where you are in the world?

two halves. self-awareness is knowing where you are... your gaps, your blind spots, what the market is telling you. action-oriented is doing something about it. his shorthand was don't tell me, show me.

a founder who nods at every note isn't coachable. that's agreeable. a founder who argues with every note isn't either. coachable is the one who hears the note, decides whether it's right, and comes back a week later with something changed.

i should be fair to the other side. coachable has a bad reputation, and some of it is earned. naval ravikant has criticized the coachable founder meme among inexperienced vcs, and i get why. sometimes coachable is code for will do what i say. the best founders ignore plenty of advice, and they should.

that's why i like his version. it isn't obedience. it's whether you can see yourself clearly and move. you can disagree with every word your investor says and still be that.

what nearly broke his model, he said, was founders stuck in a transactional mindset. founders who treat the investor like an atm, take the check and disappear. his point is that the average time on a cap table is about a decade. you're not doing a deal. you're picking a ten year relationship.

if you're raising right now, here's how i'd use this.

stop saying you're coachable. nobody believes the word. show it. in your next investor meeting, tell them about a note you got from someone last quarter, what you changed because of it, and what happened next. that's thirty seconds that does more than any slide.

and flip the test around. you should want an investor who does something like his thirty days. one who'll spend time inside the business before they own a piece of it. if they won't invest the time, why would they invest well?

getting a founder ready to show that kind of proof before the first meeting is a big part of how we run raasrocket. nobody can promise the yes. you can show up ready.

so think about the last hard note someone gave you... what did you change?