To win the best pre-seed deals, investors should engage high-potential talent during their 'founder curious' phase, long before a formal fundraise. The real competition is guiding them toward conviction on their own timeline, not battling other VCs for a term sheet later.

Christoph Lengauer warns academic founders against their instinct for secretiveness. He argues the likelihood of failing due to a lack of help is much higher than the risk of someone stealing their idea. Success requires sharing the concept with trusted people to gain crucial feedback and support, a key cultural shift from academia.

Founders can use AI pitch deck analyzers as a "sparring partner" to receive objective feedback and iteratively improve their narrative. This allows them to identify weaknesses and strengthen their pitch without burning valuable relationships with real VCs on a premature version.

To predict the future health of a partnership, intentionally have difficult conversations before any investment is made. If you can't productively disagree or discuss serious problems before you're formally linked, it's highly unlikely you'll be able to do so when the stakes are higher post-investment.

Spend significant time debating and mapping out a project's feasibility with a trusted group before starting to build. This internal stress-test is crucial for de-risking massive undertakings by ensuring there's a clear, plausible path to the end goal.

Instead of walking into a pitch unprepared, Reid Hoffman advises founders to use large language models to pre-emptively critique their business idea. Prompting an AI to act as a skeptical VC helps founders anticipate tough questions and strengthen their narrative before meeting real investors.

Rather than imposing processes after investing, VCs can use frameworks like the "sales sprint" as a pre-investment litmus test. Sharing the approach and observing the founder's reaction reveals their mindset. A founder who is eager to adopt a disciplined, customer-centric process is a stronger bet than one who must be forced into it.

Early-stage founders should reframe their pitching goal. The first conversation is not about securing investment but about being compelling and clear enough to make the VC want a follow-up. This mindset shifts the focus from an exhaustive data dump to telling a concise, memorable story that sparks interest.

To truly validate their idea, Moonshot AI's founders deliberately sought negative feedback. This approach of "trying to get the no's" ensures honest market signals, helping them avoid the trap of false positive validation from contacts who are just being polite.