How we got from a pile of decks to a million investors.
A decade of decks
Jeff has read more pitch decks than almost anyone alive. Somewhere past the hundredth campaign they stopped being interesting, because they stopped being predictive.
Two founders would arrive in the same week. Same market, same revenue, same slide template, the same tidy hockey stick on slide nine. One would be oversubscribed inside six weeks. The other would spend nine months chasing meetings and quietly fold. Nothing in either deck told you which was which, and everybody in the room kept pretending it did.
The one percent problem
Roughly one founder in a hundred raises the round they set out to raise. That would be defensible if it were the best one in a hundred.
It is not. It is the one who already knew somebody. The warm introduction is the industry’s stand-in for merit, and it is a poor one: it measures who a founder went to school with, who they worked for, which city they live in. Everyone in venture knows this. Almost nobody has anything better to use, so the proxy stays.
So we went around it
The first founders we took on were B Corps and impact companies. Certified, audited, real customers, real proof, and still told their margins were too patient and their market too small.
So we stopped taking them to venture capital and took them to the crowd instead. GOT BAG, pulling plastic out of the sea with a network of Indonesian fishermen. Neighborhood Sun, putting solar within reach of people who will never own a roof. Regenesis, rebuilding soil. The crowd did not need convincing that these were good businesses. In some cases it came back four rounds running.
It worked. It did not scale.
$100M+ raised. 850,000 investors reached. Campaigns that finished in the top one percent of the platforms they launched on.
And every single one of them was a small team doing the same work again from nothing: the research, the positioning, the list, the follow-up, the chase. Which meant the number of founders we could help was capped by the number of hours we had. For every founder we took on there were a hundred we had to turn down, and most of them were turned down for our reasons, not theirs.
What we were actually doing
Strip out the campaign mechanics and the job was always the same one. Prove the founder.
Not the market size. Not the design of the deck. What have they actually built, who has paid them for it, who will put their name behind them, and what did they do the last time something broke. That is the assessment every serious investor already runs. They just run it privately, slowly, and only for people who reached them through someone they trust.
So we turned it into a score
BFunded runs that assessment on any founder, in minutes, for free. Pass the first tests and the network opens a little. Keep proving it and it opens further, out to more than a million investors.
Nothing is bought and no one is bumped up the queue. The founders we spent a decade turning away for want of hours now start on exactly the same page as the founder with the famous cap table. That is the whole company, and it is the only part of it we would not change.
