We Asked A VC: How Can Startups Signal Through The Noise?

Written by Dirk Bischof, Partner at Korra Ventures

Over the last few months, I’ve been reviewing more than a hundred startup decks and had numerous screening calls with startup founders, together with my two partners Tania Rahman and Dr Thomas Schreiber. 

Korra Ventures, our angel syndicate, was created to back founders who are often overlooked by traditional venture capital, women, ethnic-minority founders, and those building impact-driven ventures without access to the usual investor networks. Together, we’re building a community that connects diverse-led, purpose-driven startups with investors who want to see both financial and societal returns.

What we’re already seeing from this early deal flow is encouraging, but also revealing. Too many founders still struggle to present their numbers clearly, often citing lifetime revenues without context, or showing totals without indicating whether growth is accelerating or stalling. This makes our job hard to figure out whether to speak to and invite founders.  Others focus on vast market sizes without articulating the niche they’re actually in, or how their product is already showing signs of early product–market fit.

At Korra, we look for founders who can communicate clarity, those who deeply understand their customers and the problems they’re helping them solve. We want to work with founders who know their numbers, and can articulate the specific edge that sets them apart. Having invested into some 40 companies across our 3 partners, we wanted to share some more thoughts around how founders can cut through the noise and get investor attention. We also want to share some core lessons we’ve learned from reviewing recent pitch decks and what founders can do to stand out in an increasingly competitive landscape.

The Two-Part Filter Every VC Uses

Every day, VCs wade through an ocean of pitches. Most drown in sameness, another AI platform, another revolution promised, another founder convinced their vision alone will change everything. But what VCs are actually hunting for isn’t vision. It’s signal. The game has two parts: first, the unfair advantage, an actual structural edge that makes you the inevitable winner. Second, the tectonic shift, a moment in time when the world is moving in your direction, whether it knows it yet or not.

One founder says they’re “building an AI platform to revolutionise healthcare”. Another says they’re “former radiologists building the compliance layer for AI diagnostics, with exclusive hospital partnerships” creating the exact training data moat to differentiate themselves. Same space. Entirely different signal strength.

Pre-Seed: Articulate Your Secret

At the earliest stage, you have almost nothing tangible. No revenue, barely a product, maybe just a prototype and a theory. What you do have, what you must have, is a secret. Some contrarian understanding of the market that you’ve earned through direct experience (ideally), that gives you a perspective others simply cannot access.

VCs aren’t betting on your idea. They’re betting that your unique vantage point or experience lets you see a truth the market hasn’t priced in yet. Your job is to articulate that secret with precision: “Everyone believes the problem is X, but our time at previous company showed us it’s actually Y – and here’s the data.” This is where founder-market fit becomes existential.

Pre-Seed: Build Strategically in Public

Share the technical problems you’re solving, the non-obvious hurdles you’ve discovered. A detailed thread about data challenges in your niche signals deep expertise in ways a launch announcement never could.

Don’t just post vanity metrics. Write about “3 Non-Obvious Data Hurdles in Building Your Niche AI Tool” to demonstrate you’re solving real, complex problems. This type of strategic public building separates founders with genuine domain expertise from those simply chasing trends. It’s not about being loud, it’s about broadcasting credible technical signal that VCs recognize as authentic.

Pre-Seed: Secure Anchor Advisors

Get a domain expert whose credibility transfers to you, a Chief of Radiology for a health tech startup, a technical luminary for a developer tool. Suddenly your secret has external validation. This isn’t about collecting impressive names.

It’s about demonstrating that people who actually understand your space believe in your insight. When a recognised expert in your domain is willing to attach their reputation to your vision, it transforms your contrarian insight from hypothesis to validated thesis in the eyes of investors.

Pre-Seed: Leverage Your Unconventional Background

For founders from unconventional backgrounds, your experience isn’t a diversity checkbox, it’s proprietary market intelligence. Frame it that way. Your narrative becomes: “My years in this overlooked space gave me direct access to a problem worth billions that Silicon Valley founders can’t even see. We’re not asking for a chance. We’re offering you access to a market you’d otherwise miss entirely.”

Your unique perspective is a massive signal, not noise. The VC industry in 2025 is actively seeking diversity of thought because it uncovers untapped markets that traditional founders simply cannot access.

Seed Stage: Show Your Magic Metric

Now you have customers. The question shifts from “Do you understand something others don’t?” to “Have you built a machine that can scale?” Show your magic metric, maybe it’s 120% net revenue retention, proof that customers don’t just stay, they expand. Maybe it’s 30% month-over-month organic growth, evidence of built-in virality. This is about systematically demonstrating that you’ve peeled away product risk.

VCs need tangible proof that you’ve found product-market fit and a repeatable motion. The magic metric is your clearest signal that customers genuinely love what you’ve built.

Seed Stage: Prove Scalable Go-To-Market

Show your scalable go-to-market motion. In 2025, that means product-led sales: using AI to identify high-intent users from your free tier and routing them seamlessly into a sales process. Prove your CAC payback is under twelve months.

This demonstrates you’ve peeled away market risk, you know how to acquire customers efficiently and repeatably. VCs want to see that growth won’t require burning absurd amounts of cash. The hybrid approach of product-led growth combined with strategic sales is the 2025 standard for demonstrating a scalable, capital-efficient engine.

Seed Stage: Present Your Scaling Plan

Show how you’ll hire your first 10 engineers or 5 account executives. Demonstrate you’ve thought about culture and systems, not just headcount.

This peels away team scaling risk, proving you understand that scaling isn’t just about throwing money at hiring, but about building organizational infrastructure that can handle growth. VCs want to see that you’ve thought through the operational challenges ahead and have a methodical plan for building the team that will execute your vision.

For Bootstrapped Founders: Frame Efficiency as Strength

Every dollar/GBP you didn’t raise is a signal of discipline. Structure your story around the risks you’ve already eliminated: “We’ve reached $50k MRR without external capital, systematically de-risking product and initial market.

The funding we’re raising now is exclusively to de-risk the scaling layer the sales team and paid channels we’ve already validated the unit economics for.” This isn’t scrappiness. It’s proof of capital efficiency and grit. You’ve demonstrated the ability to build and validate without external pressure, and now you’re ready to pour fuel on a fire that’s already proven it can burn.

AI Must Be Core Architecture, Not a Feature

The 2025 landscape has shifted. AI isn’t a feature anymore; it’s either your core architecture or it’s noise. VCs can spot the difference instantly. They’re not impressed by “we use AI.” They’re looking for businesses where AI enables a step-function improvement in a workflow that literally couldn’t exist before.

The signal is that AI is the fundamental architectural principle of your product, creating capabilities that weren’t possible with previous technology. This is the difference between bolting AI onto an existing solution and building something genuinely new from the ground up.

Capital Efficiency Is Non-Negotiable

In a world of higher interest rates, the path to profitability isn’t optional, it’s the signal. Understanding unit economics from day one isn’t founder homework; it’s the price of entry. VCs prize founders who can articulate their model for efficient growth and demonstrate discipline in how they deploy capital.

Show you know exactly how much it costs to acquire a customer, how long until you recoup that investment, and what the lifetime value looks like. This level of financial rigor signals that you’re building a sustainable business, not just chasing growth at any cost.

Build an Unassailable Data Moat

The new moat isn’t intellectual property. It’s data. Proprietary, compounding, unassailable data that makes your product smarter with every customer interaction, building a defensive wall no competitor can scale. In 2025, the most compelling signal is your plan to build a data asset that becomes more valuable over time.

Every customer interaction should feed a flywheel that makes your core product better, creating a compounding advantage that entrenches your position and makes it exponentially harder for competitors to catch up.

Systematic Risk Elimination

Your goal isn’t perfection. It’s clarity. The founders who win in 2025 are the ones who can demonstrate, with tangible evidence, that they understand exactly which risks threaten their business and have a ruthless, methodical plan to eliminate them one by one.

Think of your startup as an onion with layers of risk, product, market, team, scaling. Your strategy isn’t to tackle everything at once. It’s to show VCs that you’ve systematically peeled away the core risks and know precisely which layer to attack next with their capital. That’s the signal VCs are listening for. Everything else is just noise.