Thanks Julius Ritter for having me as a judge!

Kunal Bhatia | Vignesh Baskaran | Kristopher Floyd

It’s only got better… I get to celebrate wins of multiple portfolio companies now ?

Celebrate the wins, no matter how small. And remember to thank your team, they make the magic happen!

(10-year old screenshot from Buildkar days. We were based in Bangalore, and Mysore was expansion for us)

I told them to revisit the decision.

Most founders ask the wrong question about a fund. “Is Fund X founder friendly?” is mostly noise. It feels like due diligence. It is actually gossip dressed up as research.

A venture fund is structurally wired to your upside. They make money when you win. They write down when you stall. That does not make every partner great or every board meeting pleasant. But it does mean the default is: this fund wants me to win. But, VC is not a friendship model. It is an outcomes model.

Reputation is built on the loudest voice

Fund reputations mostly travel one way: from founders who did not get the outcome they wanted.

When a company ends in a down round, an acquihire, or a disappointing sale, the founder blames the board and the board blames the founder. The story that survives is emotional, frozen in one moment, and missing the full picture.

The distortion runs both ways. Founders who had great exits? Some of them have equally sharp opinions about their investors. They just share them quietly. When you are sitting on a M&A/IPO or secondary outcome, you have the luxury of staying out of public debates. So startup gossip ends up over-indexed on disappointment and under-indexed on complicated success.

The result: you are making a high-stakes capital decision based on a sample set that is structurally biased toward failure narratives.

“Not founder friendly” is an incomplete label

Sometimes it means the fund behaved badly. Other times, it means the partner held the founder accountable, pushed back on a weak plan, or refused to rubber-stamp every pivot.

Those are very different things. A functioning board is not always a comfortable board.

Ask yourself: did the fund behave badly toward the founder, or did the fund behave badly toward the founder’s bad decision? Because if a partner blocked a reckless Series B when the unit economics were broken, that is not adversarial. That is their job.

The real question

Can you work with this person for the next 8 to 10 years when things get weird?

Because they will get weird. Missed quarters. Executive turnover. Co-founder tension. A bridge round you never planned for. In those moments, brand matters less than behavior. You are not picking a logo. You are picking a long-term teammate with real power over your cap table.

So reframe the entire diligence question. Stop asking whether the fund is founder friendly. Start asking: how does this partner behave when they hold leverage and the company is underperforming?

That is the only data point that actually matters.

Stay away from an investor who kicks you when you are down.

Do the actual work

Three reference checks before you take any fund reputation seriously:

Talk to founders who won with that fund and actually made money; ask what the partner did when leverage shifted and the company missed plan, not just how helpful they were when growth was up and to the right

Talk to founders who struggled or failed, but probe for specifics instead of accepting vague complaints. “They were not supportive” is not useful; “they forced an acqui-hire against my recommendation at the 18-month mark” is

Meet the individual partner yourself and ask: were they useful when things broke, not just when the TechCrunch headline was live?

One more tactic most founders skip: talk to operators who have served on boards alongside that partner. CEOs see their investor through one lens. Independent board members or observers see the full dynamic … how the partner handles a contentious vote, whether they grandstand in meetings or do the real work offline, whether they protect founder equity when a new lead wants aggressive ratchets.

Match the fund to your actual company

Investor-Founder-Fit is not universal. It is contextual. it has nuances.

A fund that pushed a B2B SaaS company too hard toward growth-at-all-costs might be exactly the right partner for a capital-efficient PLG play. A partner known for being “hands-off” might be perfect for a second-time founder who wants capital with minimal interference, but a disaster for a first-time founder who needs active help recruiting a CxO.

Before you walk into any partner meeting, know three things about yourself: how much board involvement you actually want, how you handle direct feedback under pressure, and what specific gaps (recruiting, enterprise sales, international expansion) you need the investor to fill. Then run the reference checks against those specific variables, not against a generic friendliness score.

One founder’s great VC is another founder’s average board member. That is completely normal. Just like one person’s favourite cricketer is another person’s overrated opener, fund reviews are deeply personal, situational, and stage-dependent.

The standard you should actually hold

Stop optimizing for a fund that everyone likes. That fund does not exist, and even if it did, universal approval is a yellow flag; it might mean they never hold anyone accountable.

Optimize for a partner who has a track record of being honest when it is inconvenient, who has backed companies through real adversity and stayed constructive, and who you can call at 11pm when a key executive just quit and the board meeting is in six days.

That is a very different filter than “are they founder friendly.”

Stop outsourcing this judgment to startup gossip.

Find your own tribe.

For too long, parts of the market sold proximity as expertise:
Brokerage, camouflaged as management fees.
Secondaries, repackaged as startup support.
One-off investors, mis-labelled as LPs.
Access, sold as an investing skill.

Now the mask is slipping.

My bet: A meaningful portion of secondary-hunting liquidity will reallocate into early-stage VCs that actually do the work: sourcing, underwriting, portfolio construction, founder support, and actual fiduciary behavior.

That is healthier for the ecosystem.
Less fee arbitrage.
Less access theater.
More capital to managers who behave like fiduciaries, not brokers.

If this plays out, the winners will not be the loudest intermediaries selling exposure to hot private names.

They will be the funds that can get to the next category-defining AI company before it becomes a secondary-market feeding frenzy.

PS: Thanks to Eminem for letting me remix the headline :)

Everyday is day 0 in the most founder-friendly city in the world.

Founders in San Francisco, let’s do this!

And, on behalf of the VC community, let me put it out for you:

– Investor *is not* upside capped.
We are not limiting our success, e.g. No investor will ever tell founders “Keep more of the returns, including a part of ours”. Every investor will take the full 100% (of whatever is fully due to us)

– Investor *is* downside capped
Worst case our invested amount becomes 0 (zero), aka “written off”.

In a the best-case scenario, if we will take everything, then in a worst-case scenario, we will have to be ok with taking 0 (zero).

So stop stressing about “my investors money”.
We support you even if things might not work out.
We won’t support fraud, outside of that, do your best.

That’s the VC model.
We understand it.
We wish for your success.

Most founders think the bottleneck is access. It’s not. It’s task design.

“Can you intro us to mid-market SaaS CMOs?” sounds like a reasonable ask, right?
But you just handed someone a blank page. They have to scan thousands of connections, interpret your ICP, and guess who fits.

That’s not delegation. That’s outsourced cognitive load.
High-friction asks get deferred. Then forgotten.

The human brain is terrible at generating lists from scratch. It’s excellent at pattern-matching.
Instead of an open-ended Q, share specific names. One name triggers three more.

Don’t say “FinTech CFOs”.
Say “CFOs at Razorpay, PhonePe, Pine Labs and similar”
It’s very different from “CFOs at LendingKart, Incred, and Oxyzo”
You don’t want an NBFC CFO. You want a tech-startup CFO.
Now they can sort their network in 90 seconds.
You’ve told them what you want, and more importantly, what you don’t.

Before every intro ask, send four things:

• Your one-line value proposition
• The exact persona you want
• A starter list of 5 to 10 specific companies or names
• One line of context on why each fits

Then ask: “Do you know anyone like these, or do any of these names ring a bell?”

Your investor has the access,
But you own the context.

Bring exact coordinates,
Let them provide the bridge.

Their network was never the blocker,
Your prompt was.

Give them the spark. Let their network do the rest.

SaaS-with-AI vs AI-native: Real distinction isn’t which model you use … it’s whether a human still has to run the workflow.

SaaS-with-AI product makes the user work through rows, dashboards, tickets, and workflows. AI helps them search, summarise, and answer questions.
AI-native product tries to complete the job end to end. The user comes in only for what could not be resolved automatically, what crossed a risk threshold, or what hit a guardrail.

SaaS-with-AI makes software easier to use.
AI-native makes a big part of the software disappear.

SaaS-with-AI: Shows data = “Here are 420 support tickets. Ask me anything”
AI-native: Shows decisions = “417 resolved. 3 issues need your decision and here’s why these 3 escalated”

In SaaS-with-AI, the user is still the processor.
In AI-native, the user becomes a supervisor.

Don’t slap a chat box on a SaaS dashboard and call it AI-native. It is not.

Stop building better dashboards.
Build systems that make dashboards unnecessary.

Everyone tells founders to raise the biggest round possible. That instinct feels rational: more runway, more options, more safety. But at the earliest stage, it’s often backwards.

For e.g. If $500k is enough to reach your next real inflection point, closing it in a week beats spending eight weeks chasing $2mn.

Why?
Early-stage startups don’t win on bank balance. They win on learning velocity.

Those seven “lost” weeks are:
Product decisions you didn’t make,
Onboarding loops you didn’t fix,
Customer calls you didn’t take,
Experiments you didn’t run.
Each. One. Compounds.

The startup that executes earlier: Shows up with insights and traction.
The one still pitching? Shows up with an over-optimised deck.

There’s also a cost no one puts on the fundraising spreadsheet: founder attention.
Fundraising is a full-time job. It drains bandwidth, slows decisions, and pulls you out of operating rhythm for months.

Every extra week in a pitch meeting is a week not spent shipping, selling, or learning.
That matters because momentum isn’t something you can buy later.

Speed also sets you up better for what comes next. By the time a peer closes their bigger round, you may already have user growth and early product signals that flip the leverage entirely. Speed today produces better terms tomorrow.

One caveat: Smaller-and-faster only works if the smaller round funds real progress. If $500k leaves you undercapitalized or sends you back to fundraise in 90 days, the advantage evaporates. Capital-intensive businesses such as DeepTech, Regulated industries (Pharma, Defence), or winner-take-most markets … may genuinely need the larger check.

The real framework isn’t “small round good, big round bad”.
It’s simpler: raise the minimum that gets you to the next sharp milestone with confidence. Not the maximum the market will tolerate.

Find investors who decide fast. Close. Get back to compounding.