You shouldn’t fall for these things…

This week covers: how to not kill a great pitch in one sentence, a juror who did not understand the assignment and gave unsuitable advice with full confidence, a business model worth stealing, and…

Well, you can keep reading and find out:)

Let’s get into it!

A Mistake That Can Kill a Good Pitch – and The Fix:

There was a founder who delivered a great pitch at an event: well-structured, clear, designed to win clients from the room.

All well and good, until someone from the audience asked: “What about users and revenue?”

The answer: “We’re not gonna disclose that.”

Big mistake.

That answer signals one of two things:

a) you’re not in a good place

b) you have something to hide

Neither was true in his case. He had thousands of users and revenue at an early stage.

That’s not just something you disclose, it’s something you pride yourself in.

The fix: Don’t just say the number. Package it.

“Out of our xK users, about x% are paying – so roughly x paying customers.

We’re charging $x/month, which puts us at around $xK MRR. The pricing is intentionally low right now while we focus on acquisition and retention.

Our challenge – and where we’d love your input – is: how do we monetize this audience better? Do we raise prices? Add tiers? We’d love the room’s take.”

Now you’ve done three things:

1. You showed traction (people are paying)

2. You framed the low revenue as a strategy problem, not a failure

3. You invited the room in — and suddenly everyone wants to help you

The number didn’t change. The story did.

Advice That Bothered Me and Why:

After the pitch, one of the jurors said:

“Your pitch wasn’t targeted enough toward investors. You should have positioned it from an investor’s perspective.”

The misleading assumption here: that you should always pitch to investors, regardless of who’s actually in the room.

You don’t.

You pitch to your audience.

Here’s our context: 120 people in the room, 5 investors (the jury), and 115 builders and founders who are potential customers.

• If you’re at a demo day specifically designed for fundraising, pitch to investors.

• If the majority of the room can become customers, you do a customer pitch.

• If you’re at a community event with a mixed room, decide which audience you’re targeting and craft your pitch accordingly.

Investors sometimes forget that it’s not the founder’s job to hand-feed everything to them during a public pitch. It’s the investor’s job to do due diligence, ask follow-up questions, and set up a call.

A Business Model Worth Stealing:

The company: Fly.io

The standard model of a cloud infrastructure platform for developers gives you two options:

a) rent a server by the month and pay a flat fee whether you use it or not

b) go serverless: throw compute tasks at a provider, they handle everything, but pick the cheapest possible resources for you.

Fly.io does something in between, and it’s clever.

You spin up a server with exactly the specs you need – say, 6 CPUs and 4GB RAM – run it for as long as you need (could be two minutes), then shut it down.

The golden nugget: The best business models give people the feeling of control while doing the optimization work invisibly in the background.

Users get agency. You get efficiency. Everyone wins.

This model would benefit any business where the current model forces people to either:

a) overpay for fixed packages

b) surrender control to an opaque system

Let’s take a co-working space as an example:

• Members book the workspace using credits;

• Before they show up, they configure the room: projector on or off, catering preferences, seating setup, internet specs etc;

• They walk in and everything is ready;

• They leave and only pay for what they actually used.

The Spotlight Section:

I was at an event a couple of weeks ago and spent some time talking with George Roth, someone who, by all accounts, has every reason to walk into a room with an “I’ve made it” attitude.

Instead, he was completely grounded.

What impressed me was his network thinking.

Every time someone said something, you could almost see him running through a mental Rolodex:

Who do I know in that space? Who said something similar last month? Who should these two people be talking to?

Then he’d proceed to connect everyone with everything:

“You need to talk to X.” “You should connect with Y.” “Have you met Z? I’m making that intro right now.”

The instinct itself – to think first in terms of network – is a skill worth developing.

If you don’t already follow him, you should: George Roth on LinkedIn

P.S. He entrusted us with restarting the Romanian-American Business Network Silicon Valley meetup, happening on March 5th at the European Startup Embassy.

See you there:)

The Shiny Numbers Syndrome

OpenAI raised $110 billion at a valuation of around $800 billion.

The investors:

1. Amazon (which OpenAI already pays for servers)

2. Nvidia (which OpenAI already pays for GPUs)

3. SoftBank — who are the only ones putting in genuinely new money, reportedly around $20 billion of the total.

Make of that what you will, but the real problem is what this does to the broader ecosystem.

A founder with a solid, healthy $1M ARR business walks into a VC meeting, and the investor’s internal monologue goes something like:

“OpenAI raised at an 800x ARR multiple. You’re doing $1M ARR and want to raise at a $7M valuation? You’re not growing fast enough. We want OpenAI-level growth.”

So, as Peter James Walker said:

“Don’t get distracted by shiny numbers, founder friends.”

That’s a wrap for this week.

If something resonated, or if you think I got something wrong – hit reply.

Always happy to be challenged 😉

See you next week 🧭

– Luca

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