Beyond the Pitch Deck: 5 Essential Skills Founders Used to Win Over Investors in 2024
In our reflection on 2024, How Europe’s Founders Can Turn 2024’s Hard Lessons into 2025 Success, we focused on changing investor behaviour. Today we reflect on how founders have responded - what they have learnt about their own abilities and uncertainties when raising capital in a year where deal numbers collapsed back to 2018 levels.
These insights, garnered from multiple fundraising engagements and dozens of founder conversations, focus on the human side of the equation. These are the topics that founders rarely talk about.
A key insight comes from examining how perspectives on capital raising changed during the 2023/24 downturn. Almost universally, founders say they significantly underestimated the scale of the task - as well as the timeline. Maybe not surprising given that for many the most recent comparator was raising capital during the market high of 2021/22.
But one of the most revealing insights relates to the skills that successful founders discovered were vital to “selling” their vision to investors. Today we look at why changing market conditions elevated the importance of certain skills and what the key takeaways are for founders in 2025.
Post campaign reflections
If we look at how founder perspectives changed during recent funding campaigns, we can group our observations into 3 categories. These all relate in some way to underestimating how venture market conditions continued to deteriorate across Europe right through 2024.
5 skills for selling the vision
Finding an answer to the SCALE and TIMELINE points above should not be difficult: Develop a funding plan and start the process much earlier than you had anticipated.
Finding an answer to "selling the vision" is much more nuanced. Below is a condensed set of insights that focuses on the human and communication skills successful founders discovered were vital to “selling” their vision to investors in 2024. These five points centre on narrative-building, salesmanship, and the resilience needed to push through inevitable challenges.
1. Crafting an irresistible narrative
In 2024, the sheer volume of startups pitching to VCs was higher than ever. Many founders realized that having a strong product or interesting technology alone wasn’t enough to stand out. What sealed the deal was the ability to tell a compelling story - one that mapped out a bold future, highlighted a unique market opportunity, and established the founder’s personal connection to the problem they were solving.
Why It Mattered
When hundreds of pitch decks are flooding inboxes, investors gravitate to founders who can paint a vivid picture of why this company exists and how it will change the world. A powerful narrative pulls people in emotionally, helping them envision a future state where the startup’s solution is indispensable.
Key Takeaways
2. Mastering the art of Investor “Sales”
Founders in 2024 realized that raising capital is not just an administrative activity - it’s essentially selling a product (your company) to a special type of customer (investors). Yet many underestimated how sophisticated this sales process would be. From the initial pitch to due diligence and final negotiations, each step demanded persuasion, active listening, and relationship-building.
Why It Mattered
Investors are constantly on the lookout for teams that can sell - sell the product to end-users, sell future hires on joining the mission, and sell potential partners on collaboration. A founder’s ability to effectively “sell” to them serves as a strong proxy for how well they’ll sell to the rest of the market.
Key Takeaways
3. Demonstrating resilience and mental toughness
Even the most promising startups faced dozens of “no’s” before hearing a “yes.” In 2024, with VCs being more selective and due diligence processes stretching longer, founders had to manage an incredible amount of rejection and still keep pushing.
Why It Mattered
Investors are acutely aware that the startup journey is filled with setbacks - product pivots, hiring challenges, and market fluctuations. They take note of how founders handle adversity: do they adapt and come back stronger, or crumble under pressure?
Key Takeaways
4. Using data and metrics to back up your vision
While an emotional narrative is critical, successful founders in 2024 knew that an inspiring story without compelling data would fall flat. As the market cooled even further from 2023, investors began to expect more proof points - whether it was active users, revenue traction, or clear evidence of product/market fit.
Why It Mattered
Investors look for teams who can combine big-picture dreaming with the discipline of data-driven decision-making. Founders who showed mastery over the numbers - market sizing, customer acquisition cost, churn rates - were more likely to instil confidence in investors.
Key Takeaways
5. Establishing personal credibility and a support network
Increasingly selective investors in 2024 scrutinized not just the product or market, but the people behind it. Founders discovered that building personal credibility - through past achievements, relevant experience, or reputable advisors - was essential to earning the trust of sophisticated investors.
Why It Mattered
Early-stage investments often hinge on the perceived ability of the founding team to execute. Investors want to see that founders have the domain expertise, grit, and network to overcome obstacles and navigate inevitable pivots.
Key Takeaways
Conclusion
Raising Seed and Series A capital in 2024 remained a high-stakes endeavour, but founders who excelled in the following areas found more success:
By concentrating on these five core skill sets, the top-performing founders didn’t just raise capital - they built lasting relationships with investors who became active partners in their companies’ success. And in an era where both competition and caution among VCs continued to rise, those human-centred, story-led, and data-backed approaches proved to be more important than ever for closing the deal.
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