After 300+ pre-seed checks: investors forgive misses, not surprises
MartinGTobias · x · 2026-10-30
Pre-seed investor Martin Tobias, after 300+ checks, lists what founders get forgiven for: missing revenue plans by 40%, month-9 pivots, a bad month with on-time updates, cofounder breakups disclosed early. Unforgivable: going dark 90 days, bridge requests 3 weeks before payroll, fudged metrics, raising silently. "It's never the miss. It's the surprise."
More from Venture
- From Larry Page nearly killing Google Cloud to $30B+ a quarter: GCP's turnaround — IsForAt · 2026-10-30
- Only 5% of ChatGPT users pay — a reality check on AI agent penetration — TheMoonMidas · 2026-10-30
- 36 AI insiders vote on where to sell private datasets; micro1 tops with 19 votes — rbhar90 · 2026-10-30
- Sebastian Thrun co-founds Dulo to build foundation models for hardware design, $130M seed — ArnoCandel · 2026-10-30
- Compute lending is quietly already happening at a major VC fund, says investor — matt_slotnick · 2026-10-30
- Jack&Jill Matches Closed-Model Quality with Together AI's Open-Model Post-Training — togethercompute · 2026-10-30