Founders often respond to a difficult fundraising process by refining the pitch, adding more detail and trying to explain the company more clearly. David Kim argues that the missing piece may instead be the strength, relevance and sequence of the signals investors use to judge a company.
In this TNGlobal Q&A, David Kim discusses how fundraising narratives change across stages and investor types, why Asian startups may need to translate the meaning of their evidence for international investors, and where AI-generated pitch materials can help or weaken credibility.
Founders often spend considerable time refining their product story. Where do you see the biggest gap between that story and what investors actually need to understand?
I once watched a beautifully produced corporate film: drone shots, swelling music, employees smiling at the camera, followed by the inevitable claim about changing the world. Twenty seconds later, the investor was scrolling through his phone.
The film was not bad. It was simply answering a question the investor had never asked.
Founders often treat fundraising as an explanation problem. When investors do not respond, they add another slide, more market data, a longer technical explanation. A 20-page deck becomes 30, then 40. But information density and signal density are not the same thing.
One question I hear repeatedly from founders captures the frustration: “Why could Fei-Fei Li raise $230 million with barely a company yet, no product, little traction, while every time we meet investors they tell us to come back with more traction?”
The interesting part is the second half. Founders assume the missing ingredient must be traction because that is what they were asked to bring back. But perhaps traction was never the decisive missing signal.
A founder’s track record can be a signal. So can a customer renewing for the third time, revenue tripling, a strategic investor coming in, or technology being validated by someone whose judgment matters. The signal depends on the company and on who is looking at it.
I increasingly think of fundraising as signal assembly: finding the few pieces of evidence that actually change how an outsider sees the company, then putting them in the right sequence.
The first question is not: How do I explain everything?
It is: What does this investor need to recognize first?
How does the narrative a company needs at pre-seed or seed stage change as it moves toward Series A and later rounds?
At pre-seed, investors are often being asked to believe before much evidence exists. The founder, the insight and the size of the possible future carry considerable weight. By Series A, the burden moves from possibility to proof.
I saw this while working with an early-stage robotics startup entering a Korean government-backed global IR competition. Ninety-two companies in the field, each with a deck, a pitch and a story they believed in. We focused less on adding slides than on the sequence of recognition: what does an investor see first, and does it make them want to see the next thing? The company won the Grand Prize.
The underlying shift between rounds is this: adjectives should disappear, replaced by evidence. “Huge market” becomes market share or growth rate. “Customers love us” becomes retention. “World-class technology” becomes something an independent third party is willing to validate publicly.
The earlier the stage, the more the founder is the signal. The later the stage, the more the company has to speak for itself, through numbers that move in the right direction, customers who stay, and validation that did not come from the company’s own marketing.
What tends to go wrong when founders use the same pitch narrative for customers, investors, media and potential partners?
They assume everyone is asking the same question.
A customer wants to know how much money your product will save or make. An investor wants evidence the company can become many times larger: growth, retention, margins, traction. A journalist asks why this matters now. A strategic partner asks what becomes possible together that was not possible separately.
The facts may be the same, but the evidence each audience looks for is different.
I learned this partly through journalism. Companies sometimes send me thirty pages of material believing the most important fact is on page one. Quite often I find it on page seventeen. The company has organized the information according to how the business was built; the outsider is looking for whatever changes a decision.
Good communication is less about adding information than increasing signal density. You assemble the strongest signals for the stakeholder in front of you and put them in an order that person knows how to read.
Think of road signs. The destination does not change, but the signs people instantly recognize can differ from one country to another. The underlying facts remain intact. The language of recognition changes.
For Asian startups raising internationally, are there particular communication gaps that become more visible when speaking to investors in the US or Europe?
Think about the difference between translation and localization. Translating a film changes the language. Localization is harder: the cultural references, humor and context still have to land with someone living in a different world.
Fundraising has the same problem. I would call it signal translation.
Over thirty years of watching companies move across Asian markets and into international capital, I kept seeing the same failure. A credential, a customer name, a government validation, carrying enormous weight at home, would cross the border and land without its meaning. The founder had presented the evidence. The investor had heard it. Nothing happened.
The signal did not fail because it was weak. It failed because it required context the investor had no reason to already have.
The opposite mistake is to explain too much. Asian founders sometimes assume foreign investors need a complete introduction to their home market. Before the investor has decided whether the company is interesting, the pitch has turned into a geography lesson.
The question worth asking before any international raise is not “How do I explain our market?” It is: which of our signals travels without explanation, which needs one sentence of context, and which should be replaced entirely by evidence the investor can recognize on their own terms?
The strongest global narrative is not the one that explains the most. It is the one that requires the least unnecessary decoding.
How much should a fundraising narrative change depending on the investor type, strategic corporate, traditional VC, family office?
The underlying investment truth should not change. The route into it should.
A traditional VC may focus first on market size, growth and the possibility of an outsized return. A strategic investor may see the same company through distribution, technology access or competitive advantage. A family office may place more weight on the team, downside protection or a sector it understands deeply.
But founders often miss something more important: these are not merely different people with different tastes. They operate under different mandates and processes.
An investor may say “great company” or “perhaps a little early for us.” Do not spend too much time parsing the adjectives. Ask what sits behind them. There may be a minimum ticket size, ownership requirement, geographic restriction, return threshold, or investment committee constraint that the person across the table cannot simply override.
Those invisible constraints can eliminate months of wasted fundraising. Understanding them before the meeting matters more than perfecting the slide order during it.
If you have ten credible signals, you do not need to present all ten in the same order. Growth may lead for one investor; validation by a global industrial partner may lead for another. Personalization should change the sequence of relevance, not the facts.
Sometimes the most valuable fundraising decision is not learning how to persuade an investor. It is recognising which investor you should stop trying to persuade.
AI tools can now generate pitch decks and investor materials very quickly. Where are they genuinely useful, and where can they make a founder’s story less credible?
AI is very good at producing fluent material quickly. That is both its strength and its danger.
Give it a company description and it will produce a polished deck, market analysis and investor memo in minutes. The language will probably be competent. The structure will probably make sense. Increasingly, everyone else’s will too.
AI knows an extraordinary amount about what has already been documented. What it does not know is often what matters most inside a company. It was not in the room when your largest customer nearly walked away. It does not know why they stayed, why an engineer changed the product, or what the investor you meet tomorrow must take back to an investment committee.
For people early in their careers, access to that accumulated knowledge can be transformative. For experienced founders and executives, I see a different risk: they begin outsourcing the very judgment their experience was supposed to provide.
The presentation becomes more polished while the thinking becomes more average. I use AI extensively, but I don’t outsource judgment to it.
AI can generate the sentence “We are uniquely positioned to transform a rapidly growing market” endlessly. It cannot generate a customer who renewed three times.
As AI makes fluent language almost free, authentic evidence becomes more valuable.
What signals tell you that a founder has over-engineered the narrative?
I use a fairly brutal test. If I cannot make the investment case in roughly 90 seconds or on one page, I do not immediately make the pitch longer. I go back to the business.
That led me to another question: could a 40-page investment case be compressed into 90 seconds without throwing away most of what makes the case compelling?
Because the 90-second constraint is not really a format. It is a stress test.
The challenge is not to film the founder, the factory and the office more beautifully. Corporate films have done that for decades. The harder question is whether you can identify the signals an investor actually wants to see, such as data, evidence and third-party validation, and compress them into 90 seconds with cinematic tension.
Can 90 seconds contain enough signal density that an investor’s first reaction is not “nice film” but “I want to know more about this company”?
That is a very different objective. And when founders cannot get there, it usually means something worth knowing: the market is not clearly defined, the differentiation is not real yet, or the investment logic has not been fully worked out. Those are business problems, not communication problems. Adding slides does not fix them.
The 90 seconds do not complete the investment case. They earn the next hour.
Looking ahead, do you expect investor communications to become more data-driven, more personalized or more standardized as AI becomes part of fundraising workflows?
Probably all three. But the more interesting change will be in how companies compete for attention before analysis even begins.
Consider the inbox of an opinion editor at the Financial Times or the South China Morning Post. Every day, academics, CEOs and experts are pitching ideas. Perhaps one or two survive. The editor faces essentially the same problem as an investor: too many credible claims competing for too little attention.
I ran into the same problem in a very different arena. When my early pitches to leading international media were rejected, my instinct was the same one founders have after a failed fundraising meeting: research more, rewrite the opening, explain better. Eventually I realized that better explanation was only part of the answer.
Three decades in investment and finance gave me material a conventional journalist might not have. A memory from inside a semiconductor fab of Hynix nearly twenty years ago could become the opening scene for a piece about today’s chip race. An encounter with a global business leader looked different when I asked not whether the statement was right, but what investment position I would take if I still managed money. A Silicon Valley VC’s investment criteria looked different again when I considered how an entrepreneur in Nairobi or Jakarta might hear them.
Those were not writing techniques. They were accumulated experiences that were difficult for someone else to reproduce.
Then a different kind of signal began accumulating. One published article made the next editor’s decision slightly easier. Investment experience, interviews, reporting and previous publications formed a cluster. None proved very much alone. Together, they reduced the cost of deciding whether my next pitch was worth opening.
Founders face the same temptation I did: after rejection, look for the problem in the explanation. Sometimes that is where the problem lies. But sometimes the answer is to stop polishing the same story and look for the signal nobody else can credibly manufacture.
It may already exist somewhere inside the company. Or it may be something the company has not built yet.
The uncomfortable question is not simply: what do you have that only you can show?
It is: what signal could you build, perhaps one you have not even recognized yet, that would make the next investor stop?
David Kim spent three decades in corporate finance and investment banking before moving into business journalism. He has interviewed more than 150 CEOs and founders across Asia and writes about the intersection of capital, technology and business. He is the founder of Alpha Narrative Lab. David has also been a regular TNGlobal INSIDER contributor since 2021.
Editor’s note: This Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity and TNGlobal house style. The substance of the interviewee’s responses has been preserved.
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