A match with money, and a match with yourself.

Founders arrive convinced the problem is the deck. Sometimes the traction, sometimes the network. It's what they've had feedback on.

The research says something else. Investors spend an average of three minutes and forty-four seconds on a first read of a deck. Across a study of business plans and funding outcomes, the content of the plan had almost no predictive power for whether the money arrived. What experienced early-stage investors describe instead is a deliberate read on the founder, gut feel used as an instrument under uncertainty.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Richard Feynman

Ask an investor what is hardest to tell a founder and the answer is always the same: anything about the person. What comes back instead is that it's too early, or the wrong sector, or bad timing. True enough to say out loud.

Most founders start performing when they pitch. They lose themselves, become fragmented, incongruent with who they are and with what the company is actually doing, in order to please someone else. And it sounds good. On paper, in the pitch. Investors catch it.

The obvious answer is to get better at pitching, and that is where the evidence turns uncomfortable. Confident, persuasive delivery raises the odds of getting funded. Some founders raise on that version. Then they have to become the person they described. The companies that raise on it go on to underperform, because the delivery led investors to form beliefs that weren't accurate.

The Best Match is built on the observation that congruence is the funding factor.

The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself.

Robert Pirsig  ·  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

With selected partners the practice delivers world class decks, positioning, storytelling where necessary, the financial model and the reach outs to investors based on a warm network. This is what a fundraising agency does. None of it saves a founder who can't stand behind it.

When the deck gets redone, then the list, then the messaging, while the thing underneath doesn't move. Months of that is runway spent. Founders lose their most precious resource in the process: confidence.

And there is no performing your way through it. A serious process runs for months, not meetings. One fund manager put his own average at eight months from first contact to money, with a memo, a committee, due diligence, and repeated contact in changing circumstances along the way. What he described happening in that time is that the picture gets richer and things surface that weren't visible at the start.

Nobody holds a version of themselves together that long, in front of people whose job is to notice.

That's why The Best Match offers a programme to be the best version of yourself when raising, and from there the coaching and management of your roadshow to raise.

When a founder starts performing, I recognise it, because I've done it.