Venture capital holds an outsized place in how founders think about success. Less than 1% of companies will ever raise venture funding, and the majority of those still fail. Raising capital is neither common nor correlated with building a durable business. Despite that, many founders quietly start building as if investors are the customer.
Real companies begin with a problem that hurts. One that forces workarounds, spreadsheets, duct tape, and apologies. The best founders are not guessing. They have lived close enough to the problem that they can feel the friction in their hands. That pain is the real starting point.
We see this all the time. A company is already working. Profitable, growing, solving a real problem in a market that looks small on a slide but enormous to the people inside it. We spoke with a founder in the pet space who was already winning. But instead of doubling down, the team kept trying to raise venture capital. The pitch improved. The deck improved. The business did not. As soon as investors entered the story, the focus shifted from serving customers to making the story sound bigger.
Other examples we see are shifting business models, increasing pricing, or altering the ICP to right-size the market opportunity for VCs. VCs help push founders to think big but that shouldn’t conflict with focusing on first principles to start.
Venture capital is a tool. Useful in the same way a turbocharger is useful. It increases speed. It does not choose the destination. Treat it like identity, and you will start acting like a different person. You will make decisions to stay “fundable.” You will pick problems that are legible to outsiders rather than urgent to users. You will confuse attention for progress and polish for truth.
This pressure rarely stays abstract. It shows up in the business model. Founders start raising prices, charging for everything, or reshaping their product to inflate market size on a slide. What looked disciplined becomes corrosive. Customer trust erodes. Relationships sour. In some cases, the very changes meant to make the company look bigger end up breaking what made it work at all.
The incentives make the drift predictable. Investors are paid to deploy capital. That can push companies toward higher valuations, larger rounds, and faster timelines than the business can support. Raise too much at too high a price, and you narrow the set of outcomes that work. A company can sell for real money and still leave founders with nothing if the capital stack is wrong. Nobody has to be malicious for this to happen. Misalignment is enough.
Investors also cannot live inside the product the way you can. They do not sit with customers. Their advice can be valuable, but it is never a substitute for your intimacy with the problem. Outsource judgment too early, and you will wake up building someone else’s idea of success.
The irony is that the companies most worth investing in rarely start out looking fundable. They start out looking narrow, obsessive, and incomplete. They are built around pain, not polish. They make sense to users long before they make sense to investors.
The point here is you're never going to be VC Ready. The time you're spending raising capital is holding you back from building a real business.
When a company is real, interest follows. The order matters. Build something necessary first. Let capital amplify what is already working. The fastest way to lose your way is to build for someone who is not your customer.
