At the pre-seed stage, startups are often little more than a pitch deck, a founding team, and a few early signs of promise. While every opportunity is unique, experienced investors begin pattern matching from the very first meeting. They’re scanning for signs—positive and negative—that help them assess founder-market fit, clarity of vision, and potential for execution.
To make sense of early-stage ambiguity, VCs rely on mental shortcuts—call them “flags.” These are signals that help us decide whether to lean in or pass. Green flags spark curiosity and momentum in the process. Red flags, on the other hand, can halt a deal before it starts. It’s not an exact science, but over hundreds of meetings, these patterns form the backbone of early-stage decision-making.
While every case it’s different, I think most pre-seed investors would agree with this non-exhaustive list.
? Green Flags: What Makes Us Lean In
1. Scrappy traction:
Whether it’s revenue, a growing waitlist, or strong user engagement on a prototype—early traction with little spend shows resourcefulness and signals product pull.
2. Intellectual honesty:
Founders who are upfront about unknowns—saying things like, “We don’t know X yet, but here’s how we’re testing it”—show they’re data-driven learners, not dogmatic sellers.
3. Founder insight:
We look for teams with a deep, first-principles understanding of the problem they’re solving—often stemming from personal experience or obsession.
4. “Why now?” clarity:
Timing is everything. Great founders can articulate what changed in the world—technologically, culturally, or economically—that makes their idea urgent today.
5. Bias to build and ship:
Early-stage winners move fast. Founders who launch, test, and iterate with speed signal high executional velocity.
6. Strong command of the market and numbers:
Even pre-revenue founders should know their TAM, competitive landscape, and customer persona cold. Sloppiness here raises alarms. My own pet peeve – if English is not your first language, that’s totally ok! but make sure you don’t have obvious typos…
? Red Flags: What Makes Us Hesitate
1. Chasing trends without depth:
“We’re building an AI app for Gen Z creators” might sound buzzy, but if there’s no unique angle or insight, it’s easy to dismiss.
2. Fuzzy GTM strategy:
If your go-to-market boils down to “We’ll run some ads” or “It’ll go viral”, we need to hear a clearer path to customer acquisition.
3. Fundraising over product:
When the conversation is more about future rounds than product milestones or user pain, we worry the focus is misplaced.
4. Founder friction:
Interpersonal dynamics matter. If co-founders interrupt or contradict each other constantly, it signals trouble ahead.
5. No evidence of learning:
Even without traction, founders should be talking to customers, recruiting talent, or iterating on the idea. Stagnation is a red flag.
6. Missing critical talent:
A tech startup without a technical co-founder—especially one that fully outsources development—raises execution risks.
Not exact science, yet easy to be prepared
Pre-seed investing is ultimately about backing people who can navigate uncertainty, learn quickly, and execute with urgency. Ideas will evolve. Markets will shift. Business models will pivot. But the founders, their passion, curiosity and ability to make things happen and execute relentlessly, is what will make investors get interested above all.
For founders seeking pre-seed funding: it’s never to early to get feedback and as pre-seed investors, there are no ‘same rule applies to all’. We’ve backed founders that already had traction and a product pre-investment and we’ve backed teams with a crazy idea, pre-traction. If you’re an Israeli founder building an AI-native startup (both B2C and B2B), we’d love to connect.
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
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