At the pre-seed stage, we’re often among the very first investors founders speak to. Sometimes there’s no deck yet. Often the product is still under wraps. And LinkedIn profiles are intentionally vague, as they should be. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature of building something new before the world is ready to see it.
But it does create a real challenge on both sides of the table: how do you establish meaningful founder–investor fit when only a fraction of the story can be shared?
In those first conversations, an investor might see only 10% of the full picture. The market definition is still evolving. The product direction isn’t locked. The go-to-market plan may change three times before the company even incorporates. And yet, decisions still get made, especially at the pre-seed stage.
At Remagine Ventures, where we back founders very early, this is the norm rather than the exception. So if we can’t underwrite the full what yet, the question becomes: what are we actually underwriting?
In the earliest days, founder–investor fit has very little to do with TAM slides or early traction. It’s much more about shared conviction. The strongest early conversations usually start with a founder describing something that genuinely bothers them, a workflow that feels broken, a user experience that’s years behind where it should be, or a market that’s being served in a lazy or superficial way. When that frustration resonates on the investor side, alignment tends to happen quickly.
I’ve had conversations where a founder could barely describe the final product, but could articulate with absolute clarity why the status quo made no sense. In one case, the initial idea we discussed never shipped, it evolved significantly over the following months (different ICP and product offering, built on similar principles), but the underlying obsession with the problem stayed constant. That turned out to be the most reliable signal.
Another key tell, especially in stealth, is how founders think in real time. When details are scarce, the conversation itself becomes the product. How does the founder reason through uncertainty? How do they talk about trade-offs? Are they flexible in their thinking, or overly attached to a specific solution too early? The product will almost certainly change. The mental model usually won’t.
And then there’s the “why.” When the how is still fuzzy, motivation matters more than polish. Founders who are building in stealth for the right reasons, curiosity, frustration, a personal insight.. tend to navigate pivots much better than those optimising too early for storytelling. At pre-seed, we’re often betting on the depth of that motivation as much as the idea itself.
Some of the strongest investor–founder relationships I’ve seen didn’t start with a perfect pitch deck. They started with a series of conversations while the vision was still forming. Bringing investors into that phase can be powerful. It creates trust early, invites genuine collaboration, and aligns expectations before pressure, metrics, and noise enter the picture.
Stealth doesn’t have to mean silence. You don’t need to reveal every detail to start building relationships. You can talk about the problem you’re obsessed with, the insight that pulled you down the rabbit hole, the type of company you want to build, and the values you don’t want to compromise on.
If you’re waiting for the “perfect” deck to start those conversations, you’re probably waiting too long.
At Remagine Ventures, many of our best conversations, and some of our best investments, began when the picture was still incomplete and the vision still malleable.
And to founders currently building in the dark: I may not know exactly what you’re building yet, but after years of early-stage investing, I’m pretty good at spotting the who.
Let’s talk.
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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