How VCs actually decide at seed in 2026 — four signals that open the door

At Startup Grind’s Global Conference, three top-tier venture capitalists take the stage: Jon Callaghan (True Ventures), Frédérique Dame (GV) and Anish Acharya (a16z). In the 25-minute panel they do something seed-stage investors don’t usually say this directly: they tell you what makes them say yes — and what has stopped working over the last year. For a Finnish founder this is one of the most useful 25 minutes of the year, because the same signals apply, slightly modified, also at the table of European and Nordic seed funds.

The short version: the pitch deck no longer decides the call. Surface-level traction is not enough. AI buzzwords don’t open doors. What works is four signals that separate a fundable founder from an unfunded one — and none of them alone is sufficient, but together they create the trust on which a 5–15 million-euro risk is built.

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Source: Startup Grind — How VCs Actually Decide at Seed in 2026 (Jon Callaghan, Frédérique Dame, Anish Acharya), 5 May 2026

A little context first

The panel offers an unusually strong cross-section of seed-stage decision-making. Anish Acharya is a general partner at a16z focusing on consumer and fintech. Frédérique Dame is a partner at GV (Google Ventures) with a background in operations and scaling consumer products. Jon Callaghan is co-founder of True Ventures, whose twenty-year career has been built specifically on seed-stage investments. Together their funds have invested in companies such as Slack, Robinhood, Stripe, Roblox and many others whose names are known also in Finland.

Their message matters especially because two strong currents have shaped the seed-stage market in recent years. One is AI: every second founder brings an “AI-native” product to the table, and the investor must separate genuine category redefinition from mere repackaging. The other is the tightening of money: capital is still abundant after the low-rate years, but the discipline demanded in return has risen sharply. Together these currents make seed-stage decision-making clearer: good deals go through quickly, mediocre ones stay on the table longer than ever.

Four signals that open doors

Through the panel the three partners walk through, in parallel, what works and what doesn’t. Combining their messages, four signals rise that separate those who get a yes from those who don’t.

The first is the founder’s relationship to the problem at the core of the product. This is the hardest signal to define and the easiest to recognise. A good seed-stage founder talks about their problem in a way that says they have lived it personally — either as a personal frustration, as an observation produced by their own earlier company, or as a specific perspective born of years of work in the field. This stands out immediately from a founder who has found the topic through market analysis and is now trying to pitch it as something that sounds sensible. The investor asks in the first fifteen minutes “why you, why now” — and the authenticity of the answer decides a large share.

The second is the right relationship between product and market — and it is not what it looks like. Founders often bring to the table a “massive market” in which their product can take even a small slice and still build a big company. According to Acharya, this is an area where seed-stage investors have learned to be more sceptical. A good answer is not a massive market, but a tightly defined market slice in which the founder can achieve a clear lead before competition reacts. That is, a smaller but defensible position at seed is better than a broad but fragile vision. This is a shift from the last five years’ Silicon Valley playbook, in which “TAM” (total addressable market) was the main measure.

**The third is the team’s asymmetry relative to the problem.** Frédérique Dame raises that a good seed-stage team is not “complete” or perfect. Instead it is so asymmetrically strong for solving the problem that the combination of its members is rare. Example: if you are building a product that replaces a doctor’s routine decisions with an AI model, a good team combines the kind of medical experience a hospital supplier knows personally, the AI research background known from the small unsinkable firms in the sector, and the kind of sales experience in difficult hospital accounts that few startup teams have. This asymmetry is what makes the team hard to copy. I have written earlier about how “different shape” hiring is decisive in the AI era — the same logic applies here.

**The fourth is the way the founder talks about AI — and it isn’t what most do.** When every second team brings an “AI-native” product to the table, the investor’s signal hunt shifts to listening to *how* the founder talks about AI’s role. Good signal: the founder explains how AI is a necessary part of delivering the product’s core value promise, but clearly distinguishes the product’s own value from the commodity of AI. Bad signal: the founder says “we are an AI company”, presents a list of features in which AI is mentioned, and leaves open why exactly this product is better than what a competitor could build with a GPT API and a week’s work. I have written earlier about Tero Ojanperä’s message that AI is a way to rebuild workflows — the same applies here: a good seed pitch shows the concrete workflow the product transforms, not just the addition of AI flavour.

What no longer works

An equally important part of the panel is what signals investors used to look for and now skip past. This is a useful list for the Finnish founder because many of them are still cited in Finnish pitch-coaching materials as if they were decisive.

Surface traction (early customer logos, “we have a pilot with X”) is important to show but no longer opens funding alone. Buzzword density (“AI-native”, “multi-agent”, “platform play”) does not move the needle — rather it signals that the founder doesn’t yet know what they are really selling. A big market without a clear starting point is a negative signal, not a positive one. The investor asks “who are the first 100 paying customers, where are they and how do you get them?” — and if the answer is vague, the money goes to another table.

What for the Finnish founder

The Finnish seed-stage founder is in two special positions. On the one hand the products of the US funds mentioned above are only one Atlantic flight away, and many of the best Finnish companies have, in recent years, raised their funding from the edge of Sand Hill Road. On the other hand his natural investors are European seed funds — Lifeline, Inventure, Maki, OpenOcean, Icebreaker, Tesi and others — whose decision logic largely aligns with this episode’s signals, but with slightly different emphases.

Concretely: in a Nordic seed fund the “founder’s relationship to the problem” signal is often even more important than in the US, because market size is harder to prove from Europe. On the other hand “team asymmetry” is harder to build in Finland, because the senior expertise on offer in some specific areas is narrower than in Silicon Valley — but precisely for this reason, this is a signal whose construction separates a Finnish team from the mediocre. A third Finnish strength is that building a “defensible market slice” is a natural strategy in a country whose traditional strength is deep familiarity with smaller markets.

What to take away

The episode is 25 minutes and worth watching in full if you are a seed-stage founder or considering your first funding round in the coming years. But its message fits into three guidelines:

1. Start pitching from your relationship to the problem, not the product. The investor hears thousands of product descriptions a year. They remember the founder who told them why they — and only they — can build this.




2. Tighten your market slice at seed. Don’t sell a massive market. Sell a defensible starting point you can grow from.




3. Speak about AI as part of the workflow, not as a product feature. If you describe AI as added flavour, the investor walks past the table. If you describe it as an essential tool for solving a specific problem, the doors open.

The US seed market remains the world’s most demanding — and that is precisely why knowing its signals helps also at European and Finnish investors’ tables. A good pitch doesn’t tell what you are building. It tells why you, why now and why this is defensible.