Last week I spent a couple of hours mentoring MSc Finance students at LSE, listening to early-stage startup ideas and giving feedback. The ideas were genuinely interesting: population ageing, consumer fintech, dental health, loneliness. Massive markets. Real curiosity. No cynicism, which is rarer than it sounds.
But as I walked away, the thing that stayed with me wasn’t the ideas themselves. It was the gap between where these founders were and where the market now expects them to be before anyone writes a check.
Because the bar for pre-seed has quietly, dramatically shifted, and I’m not sure most first-time founders have caught up.
In 2023, showing a working prototype at pre-seed was often enough to get the conversation going. Investors wanted to know: can you build? The implicit assumption was that building was the scarce resource. If you could ship, you were ahead.
That assumption is gone.
Today, pre-seed founders are expected to walk in with a prototype, evidence of 20 or more user interviews, early retention signal, and a credible answer to the question: why will customers find you? Not your category. You.
The tools did this. Cursor, Lovable, Base44 and Bolt you can go from idea to working product in a weekend. What used to take a technical co-founder three months and a runway now takes a motivated solo founder 48 hours and a subscription. The cost of building has collapsed.
And when building gets cheap, the question changes.
Ryan Hoover, the founder of Product Hunt, put this into sharp focus recently in a piece about vibe coding. His observation cuts right to it: building software has become a form of self-expression, almost as much as entertainment as function. He described spending hours with his fiancée building a custom event RSVP site on Lovable, when they could have simply used Partiful in ten minutes. The point wasn’t the output. The act of making it together was the point.
It’s a vivid illustration of something bigger. When building is this accessible, “we built an MVP” stops being a meaningful signal to investors. Everyone can build an MVP. Hoover’s framing, “we’re all software engineers now”, captures the cultural shift perfectly. Creation has democratised. Which means creation alone no longer differentiates.
What does differentiate, in his framework, is the defensible layer: distribution networks and social graphs that took years to build, regulatory moats, proprietary data, hardware. His own example is Product Hunt itself, it could be rebuilt technically in a weekend, but the value has never been in the code. It’s in the community, the trust, the habitual behaviour of hundreds of thousands of makers who show up every day. That’s the asset.
His sharpest insight, and the one most relevant to early-stage founders today: consumer utility apps may be more exposed to commoditization than B2B SaaS, because consumer demand can shift from utility to self-expression. If anyone can build their own version of your app, and the act of building it is itself enjoyable, your moat needs to be something the user can’t just replicate with a free weekend and an AI assistant.
Investors are internalising exactly this framework. They’re not asking “can you build it?” anymore. They’re asking: do you understand who has this problem badly enough to pay for a solution? Do you have a distribution insight, a specific, believable reason why customers will find you? Is there data, community, or customer intimacy baked into your model that compounds over time and gets harder to replicate?
The founders who can answer those questions clearly are the ones getting meetings. The ones who show up with a slick demo and a market size slide are finding the room colder than they expected.
Here’s the part that rarely makes it into advice blog posts: the conversion data is brutal.
According to a recent pre-seed survey by Fusion (focused on Israeli startups), the majority of VCs, 41%, saw only 0–10% of their 2024 pre-seed portfolio companies successfully raise a seed round in 2025. Another 37% saw between 10–30% make the jump. That means, on most institutional investors’ books, between 70% and 100% of pre-seed bets don’t reach seed.
The challenge isn’t building scalable technology, only 3% of VCs cited that as a barrier to scaling from pre-seed to seed. The real blockers are raising additional capital (57% of VCs flagged this), getting meaningful US-based traction (54%), and genuine market validation (41%). These aren’t engineering problems. They’re go-to-market problems. Distribution problems. Insight problems.
And the window to solve them is getting shorter. In 2024, the typical expected runway between pre-seed and seed was 12–18 months, the most common bracket for 55% of VCs at the time. By 2025, the most common expectation had compressed to 6–12 months, cited by 51% of investors. The clock is tightening at exactly the same moment the bar is rising.
What does this mean practically for a founder thinking about their pre-seed raise right now?
It means the question worth sitting with isn’t “do I have something to show?” it’s “do I have something to say?” There’s a difference. Something to show is a product, a demo, a prototype. Something to say is a point of view: on who your customer is, on what’s broken in how they currently solve this problem, on why the window is open now, and on why your particular path to them is credible.
The LSE students I met last week were walking into a market where the playing field shifted almost overnight. The barriers that used to give technical founders their advantage, the time and cost to build, have been compressed nearly to zero. What’s left is the harder stuff: judgment, taste, real understanding of people.
Hoover is right that we’re all software painters now. But investors aren’t buying paintings. They’re backing distribution, community, data, and the founders who’ve done the unglamorous work of sitting with a problem long enough to develop real conviction about who suffers from it most and how to reach them.
Raise when you have something to say. Not just something to show.
More on pre-seed fundraising
This post lives inside VC Cafe’s Pre-Seed Funding hub. For more data and context, continue with The State of Israeli Pre-Seed in 2025 and Pre-Seed Funding in 2024.
He is a former General Partner at Google Ventures (GV) in Europe, former head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe, and founding head of Campus London, Google's first startup hub. Eze writes on Israeli tech, venture capital, artificial intelligence, and founder strategy.
He is also the founder of Techbikers, a nonprofit that brings together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read.
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