123 Typical Questions Venture Capitals ask Founders after Pitch 2023
+123 Typical Questions Venture Capitals ask Founders after Pitch 2023
Index of Contents
Intro
Sponsored by
In addition to a concise and effective pitch, founders need to be ready for the next round of a presentation: the Q & A Session
When a VC is asking questions, it’s a clear signal that they’re interested to discover more about your Company.
When you have strong answers with relevant data, you’re more likely to turn that interest into tangible support from a VC.
Founders should always have their answers prepared ahead of time in order to be ready to secure that support.
Product strategist Benjamin Lindor compiled 123+ questions from the VC experts of:
🔹 Sequoia Capital (invested in companies now with an aggregate market value of $3.3 trillion).
🔹 a16z (investors in companies like Airbnb, Instacart, and Lyft).
🔹 Kleiner Perkins (early investors in Amazon, Google, and Uber).
🔹 YCombinator (launched 2000+ companies with a combined valuation of $300+ billion).
By using this list, you’ll be able to get a clearer sense of what questions you’ll be asked.
You can use this understanding to adjust your presentation as needed and it’s strongly recommended preparing your answers in advance, before the Q&A Session.
Business Model
- How will you make money?
- How much does customer acquisition cost?
- How many users are paying?
Competition
- What competition do you fear most?
- Who are your competitors?
- Who might become competitors?
- Why won’t a huge corporation build something like this?
- Compared to your competition, how do you compete with respect to price, features, and performance?
- What are the barriers to entry?
Competitive Advantage
- What do you understand that others don’t?
- What’s new about what you make?
- Why isn’t someone already doing this
- What, exactly, makes you different from existing options?
- What are the key things about your field that outsiders don’t understand?
- What do you know about this space/product others don’t know?
- How is your product different?
Customers
- What are the top things users want?
- Who needs what you’re making?
- Who would use your product?
- What resistance will customers have to trying you and how will you overcome it
- How are you meeting customers?
- How are you understanding customer needs?
- What do you understand about your users?
- Who is going to be your first paying customer?
- How do you know customers need what you are building?
- What makes new users try you?
- Why do the reluctant ones hold back?
Financials
- What is your burn rate?
- What are the company’s three-year projections?
- What are the key assumptions underlying your projections?
- What future equity or debt financing will be necessary?
- How much of a stock option pool is being set aside for employees?
- When will the company get to profitability?
- How much burn will occur until the company gets to profitability?
- What are your unit economics?
- What are the factors that limit faster growth?
- What are the key metrics that the management team focuses on?
Fundraising
- Have you raised funding?
- How much equity and debt has the company raised; what is the capitalization structure?
- How long can you go before funding?
- How much is your company valued at?
- Do you prefer debt or equity?
- How much is being raised in this round?
- What is the company’s desired pre-money valuation?
- Will existing investors participate in the round?
- What is the planned use of proceeds from this round?
- What milestones will the financing get you to?
Marketing & Growth
- Why do the reluctant users hold back?
- Where do new users come from?
- How many users do you have?
- How will customers and/or users find out about you?
- What is your distribution strategy?
- What is your user growth rate?
- What is your growth like?
- What makes new users try you?
- What’s the conversion rate?
- How much does customer acquisition cost?
- How do you define success for you and your company?
- What is the projected lifetime value of a customer?
- What advertising will you be doing?
- What is the typical sales cycle between initial customer contact and closing of a sale?
Business Idea
- So, what are you working on?
- Why did you pick this idea to work on?
- Are you open to changing your idea?
- Someone just showed us an idea like this right before you guys. I don’t like it. What else do you have?
- Have you considered various mutations of your idea?
Legal
- Have you incorporated, or formed any legal entity (like an LLC) yet?
- What kind of entity and in what state or country was the entity formed?
- Will you reincorporate as a US company?
- Please describe the breakdown of the equity ownership in percentages among the founders, employees, and any other stockholders.
- Are any of the founders covered by noncompetes or intellectual property agreements that overlap with your project?
- Who writes code, or does other technical work on your product? Was any of it done by a non-founder?
- Is there anything else we should know about your company?
- What key intellectual property does the company have (patents, patents pending, copyrights, trade secrets, trademarks, domain names)
- What comfort do you have that the company’s intellectual property does not violate the rights of a third party?
- How was the company’s intellectual property developed?
- Would any prior employers of a team member have a potential claim to the company’s intellectual property?
Market Size
- Who needs what you’re making?
- How big of an opportunity is there?
- If your startup succeeds, what additional areas might you be able to expand into?
- How much money could you make in one year (in 5 years)?
Market Validation
- How do you know customers need what you’re making?
- How do you know people want this?
- What part of your project are you going to build first?
Product & Technology
- What is the next step in product evolution?
- How does your product work in more detail?
- What’s the conversion rate?
- What has surprised you about user behavior?
- How is your product different?
- What is rocket science here?
- What are the major product milestones?
- What are the key differentiated features of your product or service?
- What have you learned from early versions of the product or service?
- Provide a demonstration of the product or service.
- What are the two or three key features you plan to add?
Recruiting
- Who would be your next hire?
- Who would you hire or how would you add to your team?
- How many employees do you have?
Roadmap
- What are you going to do next?
- Six months from now, what’s going to be your biggest problem?
Timing
- Why hasn’t this worked before?
Team
- Who is “the boss”?
- Will your team stick at this?
- How did your team meet?
- Who in your team does what?
- What domain expertise do you have?
- Why did your team get together?
- In what ways are you resourceful?
- Would you relocate to X?
- What will you do if we don’t fund you?
- How do we know your team will stick together?
Team Experience
- What else have you created together?
- What’s the worst thing that has happened?
- What’s an impressive thing you have done?
- Tell us something surprising you have done?
- What problems/hurdles are you anticipating?
- What obstacles will you face and how will you overcome them?
- What’s the funniest thing that has happened to you?
- What systems have you hacked?
- What’s the biggest mistake you have made?
- Tell us about a tough problem you solved?
- What’s the funniest thing that has happened to you?
You may also be interested in
Stay updated!
FREE TIPS & ADVICES
