Founders prepare for the pitch as though the pitch is where the decision happens. They rehearse answers, polish the narrative, anticipate questions in the sequence they imagine the conversation will take. All of it aimed at a meeting that, in most cases, was settled before they sent the calendar invite. The decision does not happen in the room. It happens in the ninety seconds before it, while I am still deciding whether the room is worth my afternoon.
That ninety seconds has a name now, because I got tired of describing it without one. The Pre-Payment Protocol. The PPP. It is the sequence I run on every inbound deal before I will agree to a real conversation, and most deals are dead before I finish running it. Not because the founders are incompetent but because the things the PPP surfaces are precisely the things a well-constructed deck is designed to keep me from asking about.
Does the company exist as a legal object I can verify?
Not the product or the vision, but the entity: a registered company, in a jurisdiction I can look up, with the founder’s name attached to it in a way that matches the email signature. This is where the protocol ends more often than you would expect. A founder raising $2M who has not incorporated, or who has incorporated somewhere specifically structured to make the cap table unreadable, has told me something the pitch deck never would have.
Has the founder finished anything?
Before the company, not inside it. I am looking for one completed hard thing, shipped or sold or scaled, with a specific retained lesson the founder can describe without reaching for a framework. The detail is the signal. “We learned to listen to customers” is the language of someone who has finished nothing. “We killed the feature in month four because the cohort data showed activation falling at exactly the point the onboarding asked users to do something unfamiliar” is a different conversation entirely, and the difference is audible inside thirty seconds.
Who else has seen this, and what did they do?
Not who is interested, because interest is free and enthusiasm from someone who has not yet committed is negative information dressed as positive. I want to know who has already passed, because the investors who passed are running the same sequence I am, and three quiet nos from people whose judgment I respect is a verdict that arrives before I have opened the deck. The founder who insists I am the first to see it, on a round that has been open for four months, is answering a different question than the one they think they are answering.
Does the money story survive one subtraction?
I remove the single largest customer from the revenue number and look at what remains. A startup whose ARR is one logo in a trench coat is not a startup with revenue, it is a consulting relationship with a pricing page, and the distance between those two things is the distance between a Series A conversation and a slow, undiscussed unwinding. Concentration risk is not a growth-stage problem that will solve itself. It is a pre-seed problem wearing a growth-stage number.
Is the raise sized to the work or to the founder’s fear?
A pre-seed founder asking for $4M has either not done the arithmetic on what $4M obligates them to become, or has done it and is hoping the momentum of a well-run process will prevent me from running it myself. The ask is not a neutral data point. It is a signal about whether the founder is raising against a plan or against an anxiety, and I can read which one inside the number before I get to the use-of-funds slide that was built, whether consciously or not, to launder it.
Is there debt wearing a different name?
Revenue-based financing, an advance dressed as non-dilutive capital, a convertible that nobody flagged on the summary terms. The phrase “non-dilutive” is doing heavy work in early-stage conversations right now, and most of the time it is carrying a liability into a position where it will reprice the equity stack the moment a priced round arrives. Founders frequently have not modeled this. I check for it because somebody has to.
Can the founding team be verified independently of the deck?
LinkedIn, published work, a reference from someone I know, a product that shipped before this company existed. Not because I distrust founders specifically, but because the deck is a curated document and I am looking for the parts of the story that exist outside the curation. If the only evidence of the team’s capability is the deck itself, then the deck is not evidence.
That is the full protocol as it runs in practice: seven checks, ninety seconds from the moment an intro lands in my inbox, and no deck required for any of them.
Running those seven checks against your own pitch puts you in one of three places. The first group clears all seven and is unlikely to be reading this because their round is already moving and the problem they have is choosing between term sheets rather than chasing them. They exist, that group, but the number is small enough that the outliers are obvious when you see them. The second group fails one or two checks on things that are genuinely fixable: a customer concentration that a quarter of focused work would correct, a debt facility that should be discharged before the raise rather than disclosed mid-diligence. Most of the recoverable market lives here, and the fix is almost always cheaper than the founder fears, though slower than they want. The third group fails on the foundational checks and reaches for the deck to argue the protocol is asking the wrong questions. It isn’t. The deck is not a rebuttal to a structural problem. It is the document that made the structural problem invisible for long enough to get a meeting.
The part founders push back on hardest is that the PPP does not care how good the meeting would have been. Founders who would have been compelling for an hour have not made it past this sequence, and the hour would have been genuinely good, and that is not the point. Charm is a cost when it substitutes for the checks rather than surviving them. The purpose of running the PPP before the conversation is to stop an engaging founder from spending two hours of both our time on a deal that was never going to close.
Founders read this as a warning, and angels read it as a description of something they already do without having named it. Both of those readings are accurate. The angels running some version of this protocol have been doing so intuitively for years, occasionally losing a good deal to someone more decisive and occasionally avoiding a catastrophic one because something in the ninety seconds felt wrong before they could articulate why. The ones who are not running it are the ones currently writing explanations to their LPs about why the impressive demo became a write-off. The founders who take it seriously stop preparing for the pitch and start preparing for the protocol, which is the only preparation that has ever affected the outcome.
The full version of the PPP runs considerably longer than seven checks. What is here are the disqualifiers, the checks that end the conversation fastest. The complete instrument is the longer scoring tool I actually use before I wire anything, and it is not public yet. The waitlist for it is below. When it is ready, the list goes first.
One rule to carry forward: if the deal cannot survive ninety seconds of scrutiny without the deck in the room, the deck was never the problem you needed to solve.
Most founders spend 6-9 months fundraising. Half that time is wasted pitching investors who were never going to say yes, or taking money from angels who kill their Series A fundability.
The free articles I write here aim to show you the patterns whilst the paid articles show you the mechanics.
ROI for founders: Get funded faster by the right investors, avoid structural mistakes that cost thousands down the road.
ROI for angels: Better pattern recognition = higher returns. One avoided bad check pays for decades of subscription.
Raise Ready Business Review
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Apr 24
What you get - Investor-readiness assessment
An honest read on whether your business fundamentals will survive contact with a prepared angel. Not whether your deck looks good.
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