Here’s what you can really expect from a VC partner meeting

Here’s what you can really expect from a VC partner meeting

This week on First Round Review, we’re pulling back the curtain on one of the most opaque parts of the fundraising process. Here’s What You Can Really Expect When Pitching Your Seed-Stage Startup at a VC Partner Meeting One of the most admirable traits of founders is the

This week on First Round Review, we’re pulling back the curtain on one of the most opaque parts of the fundraising process.

Here’s What You Can Really Expect When Pitching Your Seed-Stage Startup at a VC Partner Meeting

One of the most admirable traits of founders is the insane amount of courage it takes to leap into the unknown and start something entirely from scratch. Yet when it comes to standing before a room of investors, pitching the idea that you’ve poured your life into can make even the most confident founders sweat.

This anxiety is particularly acute during VC partner meetings, often the final hurdle in a fundraising process. In-depth advice on how to navigate this moment is surprisingly hard to find online. At worst, founders are left to their own devices, flying somewhat by the seat of their pants. But even at best, the playbook for how to handle these meetings is passed down through whispered conversations and one-on-one mentoring sessions. Key details like whose faces you can expect to see around the table, which order to present your slides in, which questions you’ll need to be ready to answer — it all feels like insider baseball.

As a former startup founder herself, First Round Partner Liz Wessel is all too familiar with how daunting these meetings can feel. “I remember having no idea what to expect, and googling as much as I could the night before, trying to understand how best to prepare as a founder,” Wessel says. “I wanted to know what a meeting would entail for a founder like me, whose startup had existed for less than a year.”

Over the course of 8 years, Wessel and her co-founder ended up raising $40 million for their startup, WayUp, which she ran as CEO. After leading the company to an exit in 2021, she joined Y Combinator as a Visiting Partner, where she worked with hundreds of companies, helping many of them prepare for fundraising pitches — including partner meetings for their seed rounds.

Headshot of Liz Wessel
First Round partner and former founder, Liz Wessel

Since joining the First Round partnership, she's now on the other side of the table.

“Now, as I bring companies into our partner meetings, I often get calls from founders the night before asking: What should I expect? How can I best prepare? After answering these questions several times over, it dawned on me that it might be valuable to document my answers and share them more widely.”

In an exclusive guest post on the Review, Wessel pulls back the curtain on the VC partner meeting by laying down exactly what founders can expect before, during and after the call. From a detailed breakdown of how PMs differ from 1:1 investor pitches to tips and techniques from founders who pitched their seed rounds just this last year, the advice Wessel lays out is no different than the guidance she tells her own founders.

Here is a taste of how tactical Wessel gets:

  • Leverage your point partner. “When I was pitching as a first-time founder, I didn’t realize how 'on your team' the point partner often is. After all, by bringing you in, they’re signaling to the whole partnership that they think you and your company are worth the time and effort of a meeting.”
  • Get ready to be interrupted. “It’s not just the clip of questions, but the interruptions that I’ve seen throw founders off the most. So don’t let that happen to you.” One of her favorite techniques to try here is to build surprise interruptions into your practice sessions, by enlisting the trusted help of a spouse or friend.
  • Look at the forest and the trees. “The best pitches are ones that can altitude shift, and the best founders can paint a picture of what they’ll be doing in 10 years and then zoom all the way down into the weeds of today and how they’ll get there.”

Wessel's insights provide a rare, candid look into one of the most crucial parts of a founder’s fundraising journey. Whether it’s your first time pitching an institutional firm or you're a repeat founder looking for an edge going into your next meeting, we hope you pick up something new from this guide.

Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!

-The Review Editors

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