If you’re a startup and wondering why nobody is funding your deal, it may be because you’re going at the speed of 2020, but trying to raise at 2026 valuations.
“In 2020, a startup could often spend its first 18–36 months assembling the team, building the product, and slowly finding initial revenue. Today, for many software and AI startups, those milestones are compressed into a much shorter window. The tools are faster, customers are reachable sooner, and investors are less patient. The result is not literally that every company must do three years of work in one year—but that the market often expects one year of progress that would have looked exceptional in 2020.”
Dario Amodei figured it out. He started Anthropic in 2021 and launched Claude in 2023, then grew his revenue run rate to over $5 billion by August 2025, just 2 years and 5 months from Claude’s launch and 4 years from Anthropic’s 2021 founding.
Meanwhile your startup is touting “first to market in AI for ____________.” That’s cute. You’re projecting an exit after five years, but the race to market share will have ended three years before that.
Wait, you’re raising just $1 million on $20 million pre? Because you want to minimize dilution? Awesome, you are a master at failing before you start. $1 million gets you a velocity of two miles an hour while your competition are building rocket ships and breaking the sound barrier. I’m the last one to say “valuation doesn’t matter” but in this case it doesn’t because you’re going to fail no matter what you do, so 1% of zero of 5% of zero is pretty much the same thing.
You want to win? You’ve got to raise money. Lots of it. So you can hire the best people. Lots of them. And then you need a plan to go fast because without a plan you’ll spin out of control and crash.
So why isn’t speed a standard part of VC due diligence? Everyone is great at evaluating product/market/team/channel and marketing strategy/IP and legal/terms and valuation/exit strategy and more - but nobody has a speed section in their investment memos.
Investors should be pushing founders harder on their speed strategy. Lack of speed kills startups, or relegates them to the dreaded “lifestyle company” status. Here are some KPIs to watch:
TTR: Time To Revenue
TTP: Time to Profit (or Positive cash flow)
TTE: Time to having sufficient revenues or strategic value for exit in your industry
TT$1M: Time to $1 million revenues
TT$10M: Time to $10 million revenues
TT$100M: Time to $100 million revenues
At RVC we are always looking at ways to research companies for success factors, but speed is probably the most important. Look for speed in a due diligence in your next deal.
.jpg)
