What to expect in a meeting with K Fund (2024)

On average, marriages in Spain last 15 years. Also in our country, big exits usually require the same time (E.g., Privalia 10 years, Alienvault 11, Idealista 15, Softonic 16). Based on this, it is fair to say that those startup founders that receive investment start a marriage with their VCs, and vice versa.

As long as we all have this clear, things should go good. The problem is, however, that we don’t have too much time to get to know each other and we must decide who to marry in a short period of time and within a few interactions. As a result, having good meetings is a key part of the fundraising process.

In this post, we want to bring transparency to our investment decision process and what to expect from a meeting with us, so that things go as good as possible and both the founders and K Fund have a good impression of each other.

Our investment process starts with you sending us your deck and filling our Typeform. As always, it is better if you come recommended by someone we know, as it shows that you have done your job asking about us and why we would be a good partner for you. And remember, we never sign NDAs.

Once we receive the deck and the additional information we analyze each company and decide if we want to know more. We do not meet with everyone, as we wouldn’t have time to do so. Having said that, meeting entrepreneurs is our job, so it shouldn’t be hard to get a meeting with us. The most common cases why we say no before a meeting are:

• The company or deal does not fit with our investment criteria (e.g., since we are a seed VC fund, it may be very late for us if the company is raising a big Series A).
• The startup is a competitor (direct or indirect) of one of our portfolio companies.
• We have decided to diversify our portfolio and we already have enough companies from your sector.
• We know your company model well and we have decided that is not or interesting for us.

The next step (and the focus of this post) is an initial meeting or call with the founders and up to 2–3 more meetings within the founders and the rest of the K Fund team. In its whole, since we receive the Typeform complimented until we decide on an investment committee to invest in a company, there are ~2–3 months. If you are interested, we shared our data on startups received and timings in a previous post.

As explained before, we do not meet with everyone as many deals do not fit with our investment criteria, which is the minimum we look for to consider an investment.

If we see a potential fit, we start analyzing the opportunity. Since K Fund is an early stage fund, we place a lot of importance in the team, so we want to understand very good that your team has all the capabilities that we want in our portfolio founders:

• High ambition and leadership capabilities to create a strong company culture.
• Excellent communication skills (also in english).
• Strong capabilities for business strategy, fundraising, and recruitment (CEO).
• Complemented founding team and key roles in management, technology, sales, and finance.
• Market knowledge and relevant experience.
• Acknowledgment on the topics not dominated and where help is needed.

Lastly, we look for companies that use technology to tap into big undisrupted markets and can create competitive advantages. Also, if you have already launched your product, we look for excellent metrics, either of engagement or monetization.

Big undisrupted markets:

• Big market size with potential to be disrupted, expanded or created.
• Favorable trends and changes in consumer preferences supporting the market disruption play.

Technology-based companies:

• Data-driven companies and products.
• Strong proprietary technology that provides a competitive advantage and allows high scalability.
• Focus on good design and enhancement of the user experience.

Excellent track record:

• Product engagement metrics that showcase an enhanced user experience.
• Demonstrated sales capability with metrics and strong build-up pipeline.

Founders must take into account in which stage they are, we do. In our analysis, we do not look for the same things in a company that just launched or a 4-year company.

• Pre-product/ Team phase: If you still haven’t launched your product or service, our focus is to understand how big the market and the opportunity are and why you are the perfect team to tap into that opportunity.
• Product: If you just launched your product, we do not care about monetization that much. What we want to see at this stage is high engagement and retention with your product.
• Monetization: With more established companies, apart from the previous things, we want to see high and repeatable revenue growth, growing pipeline, etc.

So your startup and the characteristics of the financing round make sense for us and we want to know more. It is time for an introduction meeting, a key part in the fundraising process as we have explained before.

Why you? — The meeting starts with a personal part in which we introduce ourselves, our investment process and our approach to Venture Capital so that you can start having an idea of what would be to be invested by K Fund. Remember to ask us whatever doubts you may have in this part or at the end of the meeting. After that, it is time for you to introduce yourself and your team, your background, the origin of the idea and your purpose with your startup.

Why now? — Once we know each other, we go into the specifics of the startup and the proposed deal. We want to clearly understand the problem/ situation, the solution, the market, and competition. Finally, we always talk about the deal conditions: Round size, ticket left for us, valuation, price of round or convertible note, timings, etc. The first meeting with us usually involves a focus on the things mentioned above, as it gives us enough information to decide if we are interested, while in subsequent meetings, we deep dive into metrics, go-to-market strategies, use of funds, business plan, business, and operating model, etc., things needed to know for a final investment decision.

Tips and considerations for the meetings with K Fund:

• Don’t worry about the meeting interface. We don’t care about doing an initial face to face meetings, video calls or just calls. Actually, calls work just fine, allows all parties to be time effective and won’t hurt your chances of getting a good impression.
• Control the narrative of your pitch. We look at the deck before the meeting, but we want you to control the narrative of your pitch, so we always go through the deck again.
• Tell a story that makes sense and clearly states your best selling points (e.g., outstanding metrics or reviews, strong founding team, famous customers, etc.) your competitive differentiation and your startup movements and key highlights up until now.
• Be flexible. We may stop the pitch to ask some clarifying questions. A good meeting should start with you doing the pitch and finish in an enriching debate.
• Be prepared to speak in english. We like to switch to english for some parts of the meeting, as we think that it is a key skill that founders need to have to create later partnerships, raise funds in Europe and discuss potential acquisitions.
• Identify your competition, it always exists. If there is no competitor with your product approach, it doesn’t mean that there are no substitutes. Be prepared to answer ¿Why nobody is doing already what you are doing? ¿What are the current substitutes? If there are many players that have a similar approach, tell us why your product and strategy are going to be the winners.
• Don’t oversell your technology. We won’t be attracted by some “Machine Learning” and “blockchain” buzzwords in your deck. If, for example, machine learning is a key part of your project, we would have later a dedicated meeting with the CTO and development team to understand your technology and how advanced it is.
• Be humble and don’t try to hide your weaknesses. Even worse, don’t try to convince us otherwise when there are clear weaknesses. As seed investors, we completely understand and embrace projects and founders that have many weaknesses and uncertainties. Actually, it is hard for us to trust on projects without any. The important thing is that you are able to clearly identify where you need to improve and what is necessary for it.
• Do your homework. Before the meeting you should (i) Prepare a data room with the typical things needed by a VC (Deck, cap table, business plan, metrics, cohorts, market analysis, technical deep dive deck, legal documents, founder and client references, previous board documents, financial statements and management dashboard, the one that the CEO uses to manage the company). Share with us the excel file for all the documents with numbers. (ii) Know the specifics of equity round and convertible notes, how they work, your preference and its implications. (iii) Control the metrics of your type of business (e.g., if you have a SaaS business, know your SaaS monthly expansion).
• Ask all that you want to know about us or ask about references. Although we think of ourselves as entrepreneur-friendly, we are a VC and we have our way of doing things, so you want to be sure that we are the right VC for you.

When the meeting is finished, we expect founders to do these few things:

• Give us access to the data room that you already prepared.
• Provide further insight on topics discussed in the meeting that may have arisen doubts in us.
• Wait patiently for our answer, we should be fast.
• Take the NOs very carefully. As we have to choose between many projects of totally different sectors with limited information and time, we make tons of mistakes (All VCs have their anti-portfolio). Thus, we usually don’t give feedback, and if we do, we ask founders to not take it by heart. For example, you can have a wonderful business not suitable to VC, and that doesn’t mean you should change it, only that you should avoid VCs.

If we finally say yes to invest in your company, we will start a marriage that will last several years, with the end goal of finishing our relationship with a successful exit. But the road to the exit is very hard, so we hope that this post helps you with one of your early steps, being funded.