This is a YouTube video titled "How To De-Risk Your Startup From Day One | Agentic" containing a monologue or talk focused on advising startup founders about the importance of proving their business viability and technical capability before seeking venture capital funding. The speaker discusses the risks founders need to address, such as technical, market, customer, and financial risks, to successfully raise investment. The content is instructional and aimed at entrepreneurs.
What do you need to prove to de risk the business and raise your round? I still see a lot of especially first time founders make the mistake of thinking that your job is to put together a deck to go raise money and that's just not the way it works. Your job is to go prove that you can do the thing you want to do and then come to VCs and say hey look, I proved it, now I want your money. So you have to figure out what do you need to prove. If you're building something at the compute layer, you're building a new AI chip, or if you're in the LLM layer and you have a new take on how to do LLM, probably it's going to be the technical risk. So you need to prove that you could do that and we wouldn't invest in anything that doesn't have a technical founder. But as long as you're technical founders and you know how to build it, that really it becomes a market risk, customer risk, finance risk and all that. You need to de risk those before you bring it even to a pre seed VC like us. Because the bar after a few years ago when VCs got back to VC basics is back to prove that you have something worth investing in. And then we'll invest.
