Imagine someone gets down on one knee.
Then comes the speech. You know the one: the rest of their life, soulmates, the whole thing. They say all the right things. And then the ring. Not a ring. THE ring, the one from your dreams.
Then, still kneeling, they add:
“I’d just like to keep my options open. Only for a few years. Just in case.”
Nobody in that restaurant is thinking oh my, how prudent.
The relationship doesn’t become safer. It becomes unbelievable. And the worst part isn’t the hedge. It’s what the hedge reveals about the speech. You stop hearing a careful person managing risk and start hearing someone who doesn’t believe the thing they said thirty seconds ago.
Founders do this to investors constantly. Not in words. Nobody says it in words.
They say it in slides.
The deck says the company is enterprise. And SMB. It's AI, (obviously it's AI in 2026) and it's SaaS, and somewhere around slide nine it's also a marketplace. It sells in Europe and the Middle East in the next 6 months. Every arrow points outward, and none of them point down.
The founder looks at that page and sees range. Optionality. A company that could win several different ways and has been sensible enough not to foreclose any of them.
I have sat on the other side of that table and watched an investor’s attention leave the room at exactly that slide. Not with a frown. A frown would at least be something you could work with. Just a small settling back into the chair.
Because the investor is reading the same page and hearing the second half of the proposal.
I’d like this to be the one.
I’d just like to keep my options open.
And suddenly the questions aren’t about the market.
They’re about conviction.
What does this company actually become? What happens the first time a customer asks for something different? What is this founder willing to say no to?
Here’s the part nobody explains to founders, mostly because the people who could explain it are the ones benefiting from the confusion.
An investor’s entire model depends on you being the committed one. They stay optional. That’s what a portfolio is: a spread of bets, no single one of which they need to be right about. They will meet forty of you this quarter and they only need a couple to work.
That’s what venture capital is. A machine for preserving optionality.
Your company has to be the opposite.
A hedged deck quietly reverses the relationship. Instead of saying we’ve made the hard choices, it hands the investor the choices and asks them to make them.
Nobody takes that trade. Not because they’re ruthless. Because it isn’t their job.
So the fix isn’t more polish. It’s subtraction, which is unwelcome news, because polish is pleasant and subtraction is not.
Founders resist it for a reason that’s easy to sympathise with: every option on that page is a good one. Enterprise is real. SMB is real. The GCC angle is genuinely real, and it took eight months of relationships to make it real. Nobody is asking you to cut the weak stories. You’d have cut those already. You’re not sentimental.
You’re being asked to cut four good ones.
And here’s the part that should be some comfort, because it means you’re not weak. You’re early.
Investors aren’t funding the company you’ll be in five years. They know you’ll add products and expand into new markets. They know the distribution will evolve. Most of what they back looks unrecognisable by Series B. Nobody is asking you to stay small forever. They’re asking you to prove you can make one thing work before you earn the right to do five.
They’re not funding your Series B story. They’re funding the first story convincing enough to get you there.
Which is what focus is actually for. Not virtue. Not discipline. Focus gets rewarded because focus is the only version of you that can be measured.
Tell me you’re building AI for healthcare, logistics, finance and retail, and I have no idea what success looks like in twelve months. There’s no version of next year I can hold you to.
Tell me you’re building AI documentation software for independent dental clinics in Germany, and I know exactly what execution looks like. I know what you should have by March. I know what would make me wrong.
That’s what makes a company investable. Not that the plan is impressive, but that progress can be judged. Optionality compounds after product-market fit. Before it, optionality just compounds confusion.
Every investor knows your company will change. They just need to know what you’re willing to refuse before it does.
The founders who raise aren’t the ones with the most futures on the page.
They’re the ones who walk in having already lost four of them on purpose.
Written from the other side of the table.
Worth keeping
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, pioneering airmail pilot and the author of The Little Prince, on what finished actually means:
“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
Founders pursue fundability by addition. One more segment, one more geography, one more product line, as though it accrues.
It doesn’t. The best pitches leave you wanting more and an investor rarely ever says out loud I wish this company had more revenue streams.
One question
If you had to close four of the seven doors on your deck this week, not because they’re wrong, but because holding them open is costing you the raise, which four could you actually survive losing?
Hit reply and tell me. I read everything.
Clipped
An anonymous Instagram account has built an audience of 150,000 people by posting one thing every day: measuring the consistency of a slice of bread to within fractions of a millimetre.
Last week, he finally achieved what he called the golden slice: 0.08 mm from perfect consistency.
And yes, he’s German.
Funny how often becoming known for one thing comes before earning the right to do many.