Nobody gives you time to explain. That’s the real fundraising problem

Picture the scene. The lights dim. A drone shot. A cello. Employees smiling at the camera. Then the line: We are changing the world.

The film was beautifully made. The investor picked up his phone ten seconds in.

I didn’t set out to start a company over that. But a founder I was coaching kept running into the same wall — and eventually asked me a question I couldn’t ignore.

His startup was heading to CES. He needed a film. He’d already worked with media agencies, spent real money, and wasn’t satisfied. The results were professional. Polished. Something was missing underneath. He asked me: How should we actually do this?

The problem wasn’t the marketing firm or the production company. It was that they showed up too early.

Before anyone wrote the copy or picked up a camera, someone needed to ask the questions an investor would ask:

Why would an investor care? Where would they attack this business? What changes the investment case — and what can wait?

Answer those first, and the agency has something real to work with. Skip them, and even a beautiful film is built on the wrong foundation.

That gap — between investment logic and production — sat between professions. Nobody owned it.

So I jumped in. Not with a business plan. The founder had a problem; I thought I could solve it. That decision was closer to just do it than anything I’d call strategy.

Also Read: Taiwan bets on Gen Z founders to move beyond its chip-supplier image

I began with the investor’s questions. What is this business worth paying attention to? Where’s the evidence? Why now? Then I approached it as a journalist — strip away the company’s own language, find what makes an outsider stop.

Only then did I think about the film.

The first real test came before CES. I was working with a startup entering the Korea Ministry of SMEs and Startups’ Global IR competition — 92 companies in the field, every one of them with a deck, a pitch, a story they believed in.

What I focused on wasn’t the slides. It was the sequence of recognition: what does an investor see first, and does it make them want to see the next thing?

The startup won. Grand Prize, out of 92.

I didn’t think much of it at the time. One competition. Maybe the company was simply strong.

Then came CES 2025.

This time the scope was wider: pitch deck, investor film, and a piece examining the company’s technology with the rigour of business journalism rather than the language of a brochure. Three formats working in sequence — 90 seconds earns attention, the article builds conviction, the deck closes the argument.

The startup went on to win a CES Innovation Award — and raise funding.

That’s when I stopped thinking of this as pitch coaching.

Maybe this wasn’t a better way to make a pitch. Maybe there was an entire category missing between investment logic and production.

Founders know their companies better than anyone. That becomes a liability when they have to explain them to someone who doesn’t.

When investors don’t respond, the instinct is to add more. Another slide. More market data. A longer technical explanation. A 20-page deck becomes 30, then 40. The assumption: if the investor has enough information, eventually they’ll understand.

Also Read: Why Beyond Border thinks visas are now part of the founder playbook

But nobody gives you time to explain.

Investors spend an average of 2 minutes 14 seconds on a first-pass deck review, according to DocSend analytics, 2024–2025.

The investor doesn’t owe a founder 40 minutes of attention. The founder has to earn the next minute.

Recognition happens before a paragraph is finished. Analysis comes after — but only if recognition happened first. Every slide you add before earning that moment is a petition to a decision that hasn’t started yet.

The question stopped being: How do I explain everything?

It became: What does an investor need to recognise first?

The purpose of 90 seconds isn’t to replace the next 60 minutes. It’s to earn them.

I became fairly ruthless about this. If I can’t make the investment case in 90 seconds or on one page, I don’t make the pitch longer. I go back to the business. Because sometimes the problem isn’t the story. You may not have a fundable business idea yet.

That’s why I came to see compression not as an editing technique, but as a stress test. And it’s what separates what AN Lab does from video production — or storytelling.

What I hadn’t expected was how cleanly three decades of apparently disconnected work converged on this one problem.

Thirty years in investment banking and finance taught me to look past the product and find the investment logic underneath it. Writing as a guest columnist for international business media taught me to cut through complexity and find the story that matters to an outsider. I discovered video as an extraordinary compression tool — data, numbers and moving images can communicate in seconds what takes pages to explain. Working with a documentary filmmaker whose work includes BBC and CNN commissions showed me something else: how powerfully film can reveal the human conviction behind a business. And AI became a creative partner — a way to show what a camera can’t capture, what doesn’t exist yet, what would otherwise be impossible to film.

For years, these looked like separate chapters. Only when I was sitting with that founder’s problem did they resolve into one toolkit.

AN Lab is that bet: that investment logic, journalistic compression, and film grammar belong in the same room — applied to the same 90 seconds.

Most founders preparing to fundraise ask: What should we put in the deck?

After two experiments and one pattern I couldn’t unsee, I think there’s a more useful question.

What does an investor need to recognise — before they owe you another minute?

—

The post Nobody gives you time to explain. That’s the real fundraising problem appeared first on e27.