A founder’s diary entry on the quiet, mutual bluffing that can creep into even the closest working partnerships under pitch pressure
It happened during a rehearsal for an upcoming pitch, three days before the actual meeting, when my co-founder asked me to walk him through the revenue model slide because an advisor had flagged it as “a bit unclear.” I opened my mouth to explain it confidently, the way I’d explained it in every prior pitch, and found, to my genuine alarm, that I could not actually reconstruct the underlying logic in real time. I had been reciting it from memory for months without fully understanding it myself.
The Moment of Mutual Confession
I admitted this, somewhat sheepishly, expecting him to simply explain it back to me with the patient clarity of someone who had, presumably, built the model himself. Instead, a long, genuinely uncomfortable silence followed, after which he admitted that he, too, had been reciting the same slide from memory, having originally built the underlying spreadsheet several months earlier and never quite revisited the specific assumptions baked into it since.
How We’d Both Been Getting Away With This
Investors, it turns out, rarely ask deep, probing follow-up questions about a revenue model slide during an initial pitch, generally saving that level of scrutiny for later diligence conversations if they’re genuinely interested, which meant we had both been successfully bluffing our way through a fairly central part of our own business model for considerably longer than either of us wanted to admit out loud.
The Actual Audit We Then Had to Conduct
We spent the following two days doing something we genuinely should have done together from the start: rebuilding the revenue model from first principles, questioning every single assumption, and discovering, somewhat mortifyingly, that two of our core pricing tier assumptions directly contradicted each other in a way that neither of us had noticed because we’d each been focused on defending our own half of the slide rather than genuinely interrogating the whole thing together.
What This Revealed About Our Working Relationship
This experience forced a genuinely useful, if uncomfortable, conversation about how much unspoken bluffing had crept into our partnership more broadly, each of us privately assuming the other fully understood and had verified whatever slide or section fell under their general area of the business, without either of us actually confirming this out loud until an advisor’s offhand comment forced the issue.
The Fixed Version, Finally Understood by Both of Us
We now have a revenue model slide that both of us can genuinely explain, unprompted, from first principles, without reciting memorised talking points. It is, if I’m honest, a slightly less impressive-sounding slide than the version we’d been presenting before, mostly because the corrected numbers are more conservative than our previous contradictory assumptions had accidentally produced.
A New Rule We’ve Instituted Going Forward
We have since agreed that before any future pitch, each of us must be able to explain every single slide in the deck, not just our own designated sections, a rule that feels almost embarrassingly basic to only now be implementing, but which has already caught two further inconsistencies we’re genuinely relieved to have found internally rather than during an actual investor meeting. Further London startup founder diary entries continue at bohiney.com, with additional London business coverage available at prat.uk.
SOURCE: https://prat.UK/