Company Building Through the Search Lens
May 27, 2025
A few months ago, a founder in my network reached out for advice as he geared up to raise his seed round. We went through the usual tactical checklist—how to build a solid pitch deck and intro blurb, getting warm intros, managing the calendar chaos, and dealing with rejection. But since we were both technical, I steered the conversation toward a different mental model: treat your fundraise like a search problem.
I used to work on Search at Apple, where the tradeoff between precision and recall was everything. In most search products, you don’t want a hundred vaguely related results—you want the right one at the top. High precision, not high recall. And that’s exactly how founders should approach fundraising.
Too many early-stage founders try to maximize exposure. They build hit lists on spreadsheets, take every meeting, and treat VC interest like social proof. Meetings with VCs tickle our inner narcissism. It feels good to tell your friends you’re talking to known names. There’s a possibility that the conversations will go somewhere. At least in SF, that’s a status symbol.
But most of those meetings don’t go anywhere—because they were never going to. The investor wasn’t a fit for your stage, space, or style. And instead of refining your pitch or moving the business forward, you just lost another hour to a polite pass. It’s the VC’s job to talk to you, and yours is to build your business. Every hour you spend pitching is an hour you are not solving the current challenge. There’s a lot of commentary in founders’ groups about whether you should talk to VC associates, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. Sometimes talking to the associate is a good idea, but sometimes you should skip the meeting with the GP, too.
It’s easy to fall into the coverage trap. Taking meetings feels like progress, but a packed calendar isn’t the goal. The goal is to close great investors with the fewest meetings possible. That means being ruthlessly focused on match quality.
If you have a strong vision, half of the investors you talk to won’t get it, but those are not the investors you want in the first place. Imagine you had access to pitch every fund in the world. Most would still be irrelevant. Many that should match on paper wouldn’t get what you’re building. That’s fine. You only need the handful who do—who see your deck and think, finally. Those are the people you want on your cap table. So use your materials as filters to save you time, not as honey pots to bait anyone with cash.
This mindset applies well beyond fundraising. Recruiting, sales, partnerships—it all can be seen as information retrieval. You’re not broadcasting to everyone. You’re trying to surface the best possible match for what you’re building, right now.
Your role as a founder is to optimize for precision over recall. Not just in your RAG but in most things that matter.
Thanks to Hannah Doherty for her feedback on early drafts of this post.
Photo: Distorted Chicago, by me. Previously posted on Chicago, Fall 2021.
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