Investors aren't buying your idea, because they're not buying you.

Why early-stage funding decisions come down to one thing: whether founders believe deeply enough to make it work.

Artwork depicting the exceptional movie Everything Everywhere All at Once. Courtesy of A24.

A founder came to me recently, understandably frustrated after months of pitching to investors with no success. His idea seemed solid and in black and white, and his deck was polished — hard to poke holes at in a meaningful way — but every meeting ended the same way: “Thanks but no thanks, not for us.”

When I spoke with him huddled in a corner of a conference’s coffee break area, I asked him, “What do you think the problem is?”

He was quick to answer. "They're not convinced by my pitch," he said.

The issue wasn't his pitch quality, or any of the technicalities of the pitch, it was a more fundamental existential challenge. In that moment, recalling all the deal flow conversations I was so fortunate to get to listen to and absorb during my years working in VC, I knew what it was.

"They're not convinced that you're convinced," I challenged back.

Here's what most early-stage founders don't realize about investing: investors aren't backing your idea. They're backing you... not your fancy degree or the blue chip companies on your CV, not even your total addressable market, though having that clear helps. At that stage, they're investing in something more fundamental: your unique (and perhaps delusional) ability to will this thing into existence when everything goes wrong.

Everything will go wrong

There is strong research that explains why investors focus on you more than on your plan. Analyses from the Startup Genome Project, which studied thousands of early-stage companies, found that most successful startups pivot at least once on the path to product–market fit. Companies that pivot once or twice raise more than twice as much capital, grow users several times faster, and are significantly less likely to scale prematurely than teams that never pivot or pivot constantly. The takeaway is simple; successful companies rarely succeed with their first idea, however they succeed because they can adjust to reality faster and more intelligently than others.

And investors know this instinctively. They’ve seen it across hundreds of deals and decades of pattern recognition. A large Harvard-led study of 885 venture capitalists across 681 firms revealed something striking.

Ninety-five percent of VCs cite the founding or management team as a critical factor in their investment decision, and almost half rank it as the single most important criterion.

The business model, the product, and even the size of the market all matter, but they matter far less than the people who will have to navigate every unexpected twist that growth demands.

This is what makes pre-seed and seed-stage investing so volatile, and yet so deeply human. Someone with an idea is trying to convince a group of experienced investors that they’re going to make it happen, but instead of saying “trust me, I’m obsessed with solving this and so I will” they rely on slides and numbers and all the rational reasons to invest, when the decision-making relies far more on the human, not the numbers that human is hiding behind. Early-stage pitching is really founders saying "This is going to work" and an investor on the other side wondering “Do I believe them?”

The three-question trap

Here's where most founders go wrong. They've been taught to answer the classic investor questions: Why this? Why now? Why me? And instead of addressing the spirit of the questions, they dutifully answer them separately:

"Why now? Because the technology is finally available." "Why me? Because I spent ten years at [insert major tech company name here]." "Why this? Because it's a $10 billion problem no one has solved."

Sure, each answer may be a technically correct answer, and probably even hard to dispute outright yet it will still feel to the investor like something crucial is missing. That’s because the best answer to those questions is not a sum of its parts. In short, founders fall into the trap of answering three distinct questions when investors are really asking just one: “Why are you, with your specific background and obsessions, the inevitable person to solve this problem, right now?”

That's not three data points, but a story that only works if the three “chunks” are inseparable. When a founder presents their experience, the timing, and the problem as independent variables rather than a singular convergence, investors will intuitively sense the gap in conviction. Their years and years of experience sitting in pitches tells them that the founder is pitching a potentially good idea, but that it’s not their idea, and that translates as too risky. In other words, they will be able to sense that this is something the founder has chosen to work on for rational reasons rather than something they feel overwhelmingly compelled to build. I believe that this distinction is the difference between a “hell yes” and a “no thanks” at the early stage of a startup.

Conviction vs. Confidence

What investors are really evaluating here is conviction, not confidence. Confidence is "I think this will work and this is why." Conviction is "This will work, and I'll do whatever it takes to make it happen."

Wherever you are, investors are pattern-matching for resilience and adaptability, not just growth potential. They know that navigating complex regulations, diverse business cultures, and often fragmented markets requires conviction (and the stamina that comes along with it) that goes beyond simply believing in your idea.

More often than not, it often requires what could be perceived as a mad, obsessive, irrational commitment to making it work. I’ve found that level of delusion is just what the doctor ordered.

To pre-empt the question I get a lot, the answer is no, conviction isn't something you can manufacture and ‘practice for the pitch’. You can't fake it, because trust me, the investors you’ll be meeting with have seen enough fakers to know the difference. Conviction is what happens when you've lived in the problem long enough that you know this needs to exist, when you've talked to enough people that their pain (the potential user or customer) is visceral to you. That's when conviction becomes blindingly apparent, and that's when writing that check becomes a no-brainer for an investor.

What to do differently

In my work with founders across different markets, I see the same pattern: the ones who succeed aren't necessarily the ones with the best ideas, but the ones who exist in a place of complete conviction that they seem to bend reality to make it work.

The short answer is “Know Thyself.” If you're struggling to get traction with investors, I would invite you to stop asking, "Is my pitch good enough?" and start asking yourself, "Am I convinced enough?" Because if you're not convinced, why would they be? (and the bigger question most founders don’t want to ask themselves is, “if I’m not convinced enough, is this even worth the blood, sweat, tears, questioning-every-decision-I’ve-ever-made?”)

And if you are convinced, if you genuinely believe this is the thing you're supposed to build, that this is the problem you were born to solve in this way at this very moment in time, then your job isn't to perform conviction but to let your guard down and trust your truth. Let go of what you’re supposed to do and say, and let your conviction take over. Let this show in every aspect of your interactions, no matter how delusional your rational brain is insisting you are. Ignore that voice.

In the end, that's what they're investing in: not the idea, but you: your ability to execute, your capacity to endure, your willingness to pivot, your refusal to quit. All of those qualities live in you, not in your data-stacked, perfectly-designed deck.

Because trust me, when you walk into that room and every person in there can feel your conviction, they will stop seeing risk and start seeing inevitability. And to an investor, that inevitability is very hard to find, and more importantly, impossible to say no to. And that's when they write the check.