Rejection, not dejection: learning from failed VC pitches

Itai Boulil is CCO and co-founder of AI startup BurseAI.

A lot of VCs will say “no” to your startup for many reasons, and most have nothing to do with its probability of success. I know this from personal experience.

Initially, I took these conversations personally, which was undoubtedly a rookie mistake. But lately, I have started taking a new approach to my conversations with VCs in my role as co-founder of AI startup BurseAI.

Image credit: Timmy Loen

Instead of taking things personally, I have started taking notes of all the comments and questions VCs ask me and saving them in a dedicated folder on the ClickUp app.

I wanted to know if I could find some correlation among the questions, and also use the data to improve our pitch and FAQs. This is what I found:

1. Analyst versus partner

There is a big difference between an analyst’s and a partner’s questions. This may seem obvious to some, but it wasn’t to me initially.

Learning the difference has helped me shape the type of answers I give and, more importantly, the nuances I add to my pitch during the conversation.

For example, an analyst cares about things other than your go-to-market (GTM) approach and moat plans, so don’t waste time on those topics. During initial meetings, their job is to assess your business ideas, strategies, and capabilities, aiming to understand your startup’s value proposition, market potential, and team dynamics to determine if it aligns with the venture capital firm’s investment criteria.

Conversely, when you’re speaking to a partner at a venture fund, you need to sell your startup’s value, return on investment, and in general, look down the road. You’ll also need to be ready to fight back on some of the counter-answers they may have.

2. Your initial pitch must be clear

If VCs are asking questions that baffle you and leave you wondering if you’re speaking the same language, it’s probably because you didn’t properly explain something about your startup from the outset.

If, for example, your pitch repeatedly gets the same question (such as “How is your company different from XYZ company?”), then you have to change your pitch and make it clearer.

This issue used to drive me up the wall, but now I understand that I never addressed the question in my initial pitch. I kept getting the same question until I realized the problem wasn’t with the VCs I was speaking to, but with my pitch.

3. Some questions have no agenda

VCs generally have vast knowledge and understand business metrics well. However, understanding numbers is one thing, but having domain experience is another.