The ten minutes are almost entirely about traction#

Twenty-five questions. Tagged by what they were actually asking about, they fall into four groups, and only one of them is about the product.

Commercial7
Product8
Founders7
Strategy3

Partner 1

  1. 01Tell us what you're working on.Product
  2. 02What's the current status? What's built, how does it work?Product
  3. 03What does it do, how does it work? We saw the demo, talk us through it.Product
  4. 04What problem does it solve, for who?Product
  5. 05So this is software that augments the control room for large energy companies?Product
  6. 06So the labour problem is knowledge workers they can't hire?Product
  7. 07Talk to us about your customers. Who are they, how do they use it, how much do they pay you?Commercial
  8. 08Is the per-agent price an annual recurring contract?Commercial
  9. 09There's a fixed onboarding or setup fee too, right?Commercial
  10. 10What's your annual recurring revenue right now?Commercial
  11. 11Is that all from one customer?Commercial
  12. 12Who are the new customers and how did you get them?Commercial
  13. 13What's the actual activity of your agents on their systems? What's happening for them daily?Product
  14. 14Does anyone at the company need to interface with the agents, or is it largely autonomous?Product
  15. 15Backstory. How did you two come together, why are you doing this together?Founders
  16. 16How did you pick this idea? You don't have a background in this at all.Founders
  17. 17You've raised money already. When, and from who?Founders
  18. 18You have a team now? Tell us about your team.Founders
  19. 19You manage the engineering team?Founders
  20. 20What's the plan going forward? Europe or US? Where will the company be based?Founders
  21. 21Where will your sales energy be focused over the next three months?Commercial
  22. 22US or Europe?Founders

Partner 2

  1. 23This feels like a forward-deployed motion. How much software are you actually building that’s part of the platform?Strategy
  2. 24What's special about the data standardisation you do?Strategy
  3. 25What's the defensibility? You're replacing a human, so you charge a lot. What stops someone coming in and repricing you by product?Strategy
One F26 admit's interview, in order. Tagging is mine; the counts are derived from it.

Seven of the twenty-five are pure commercial mechanics: who pays, how much, is it recurring, is there a setup fee, what’s ARR, is it all one customer, how did you get the new ones. Another seven are about the founders and the company around them. So fourteen — a clear majority — are some version of what have you actually done, and who are you.

Eight are product, and they are the shallow ones. They saw the demo. They’re being polite. That whole run gets resolved in four or five exchanges.

Three are strategy. All three come from the second partner, all three at the very end, and they are the only questions in the transcript that are hard.

Which is uncomfortable if you spent three weeks polishing the product story: it’s table stakes and it buys you nothing. The time goes on revenue composition, acquisition path, and whether you have a defensibility answer that isn’t “we’ll move faster than them”.

The filter is slope, not size#

There’s no revenue or usage minimum. What gets read is velocity, measured in roughly two-week units. Per cycle: did you ship something significant, or did you learn enough to change direction? And with customers, not alone in a room.

The case that makes it concrete: a founder with about 100 customers was rejected after an interview. Reapplied three months later — same vision, better answers, 2x revenue, 2x customers. In.

Traction wasn’t the problem the first time. A hundred paying customers is traction. What was missing was a demonstrated slope.

After a rejection, don’t optimise for the next application#

The reversal an ex-application-reader uses, and it’s the most useful thing in these notes: assume you’re never getting in. Actually accept it. Now — what should the startup do in the next two weeks?

The answer is almost never “build more”. Building is the comfortable excuse. It feels like work, it’s entirely under your control, and nobody can reject you while you’re doing it. What comes out of the question instead is: launch earlier than feels ready, sign a design partner, get the first euro in, go and sit with customers in person, and be able to say what you learned that you didn’t know before and what data shows anyone wants this.

Same for the application itself — read the questions again, find the two where you were vague, and fix the thing underneath rather than the wording.

The convenient part is that “what do I do now” and “how do I get in next time” have the same answer. Twelve weeks to the next deadline is six two-week cycles. Six chances to have a different story, none of which require anyone’s permission.

Ten customers who’d be devastated#

Not 1,000 signups. Not 100 people who like you. Ten who’d be genuinely upset if you switched it off tomorrow.

Ten is enough to tell you what the real problem is, what the product should be, and where to find the next ten. A thousand signups tell you your landing page works. Same instinct as everything above — depth of customer contact over breadth of metrics.

Leverage is in subtraction#

Almost all advice is additive: more hires, more process, more features, more meetings. The returns are usually in the other direction — removing a dependency, automating the manual thing, killing a process nobody remembers agreeing to.

Complexity is trivially easy to create. Simplification is real work and there’s no dopamine at the end of it. I’m biased here, I build tools that delete things for a living.

From the same notebook#

Positioning arbitrage is currently absurd. A YC startup appended “…for data centers” to its directory description and reported 25 investor inbounds the next day. Around the same time OpenAI launched a $400M early-stage AI fund. Both point the same way: capital is chasing AI-adjacent framing hard enough that the framing itself is doing measurable work.

The one line#

They’re not measuring where you are. They’re measuring how fast you got there, and whether customers were in the room while it happened.

Anyway. Twelve weeks, six cycles. Go find the ten people who’d be devastated.

Reapplying and want a second pair of eyes on the answers? Get in touch.