Former VC Investor - Now Supporting Tech Businesses Turn Strategy into Execution – Whilst Sharing Insight from Both Sides of the Fence

Hey!

I’m Kiran. I’m a VC investor by trade but I quit in 2024 as I knew I was an operator at heart and I wanted to be on the field, not watching and shouting from the sidelines.

In my time as a VC, I met hundreds of founders, deep dived on most sectors within enterprise SaaS and I invested into a dozen companies and sat on each of their Boards. When it comes to startups and scaleups, I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t.

I founded Catenae in 2024 to support enterprise software businesses with their scaling plans. I undertake fractional Chief of Staff roles with my retained clients to help founders translate their strategy into repeatable execution whilst increasing their capacity and making sure the tasks that really move the needle get done. I also work as a coach and a mentor to those looking for less hands-on support but someone to soundboard their ideas, plans or problems with.

If you’re interested in working together on a retained basis, hit me with a DM. If you’d like to book in some coaching time, check out my Hubble page: https://www.hubble.social/kiranmehta.

Alternatively, if you just want some daily insights from one of the few people in the UK that has both investing and operational experience, hit that follow button and ring the bell.

Nothing frustrates me more when I hear VC investor say:

'We want to work with coachable founders who want our advice as well as our money.'

The best founders I've ever worked with don't want coaching. Back when I was an investor, the best founders I worked with where the ones coaching me on what it meant to build a business, not the other way around.

If you're a multi-time exited founder that's turned investor then fair enough. If you're an ex-financier who's job is to sell financial investments to founders, you do not want coachable founders, you want the ones that know what they are doing and you want to get out of their way as quick as possible. If you were such a great coach then you'd put your clipboard down and you'd be building a business for yourself.

Kiran Mehta

If I was raising a VC fund in the UK right now (not my current plan btw!) I would be solely focussed on single round investing at pre-seed, with zero capital held back for follow ons.

'Why?'

We all know the UK suffers from smaller exits than our US counterparts. We can argue on why and how to solve it but it won't change overnight, it'll take a 10 year cycle to change imo. The majority of the VC market is software and there's a very small amount of UK based software businesses that exit for £100m+.

Therefore, if you wait until Seed or Series-A, and valuations are £10m-£20m it's almost impossible to make venture level returns. You'd need >20% success rate just to return the fund. That's extremely difficult in my view.

However, if you're investing at pre-seed, you're talking valuations in the £1m-£3m range. That means you can realistically get 10x returns even on exits in the £10m-£50m region. You also have a chance of a runaway, of that £2m valued pre-seed deal doing 30x-40x.

The math just don't math on investing later stage for me.

'Why no capital held back for follow ons though?'

1️⃣ Sunk cost fallacy can kill your returns, I wouldn't want the ability to be able to follow on. I'd want to do one cheque, right out of the gate and live and die with the company being strong enough to attract external capital.

2️⃣ You will never ever get a better price than the first round, therefore every round you follow on is depleting your ability to hit the big returns.

3️⃣ If you're not following on, you don't need as bigger fund and therefore your own fundraising cycle should be quicker.

I'm taking a half step back from LinkedIn posting this year.

Whilst most people start the year thinking about what they can do more of, I'm going the opposite way, thinking about what I can do less of without effecting output.

When I started posting on LinkedIn regularly 3-4 years ago I worked for a VC fund in a super competitive market, I had no prior background in VC, no network and no credibility. I started posting daily to try and solve some of that, and it helped massively.

Roll forward to today and I think I've got some credibility, no longer work in VC anyway, have a solid set of regular clients and I honestly don't think I need to focus as much on the network growth and building a reputation, I just need to continue to maintain it in the most effective way.

I've always said I'll never outsource to a ghost writer or start using AI for my posts but at the moment daily is getting a bit unmanageable so I'm going to step back to just posting on weekdays, trying to have a full unplug on the weekends and giving myself some extra time and thinking space.

It isn't always about doing more, sometimes the way to jump forward is to do less things but do them ruthlessly well.

Call me old fashioned but I really think people need to own their own performance before they start marketing their help to other people.

I'm getting more and more people reach out to me recently asking if I want to buy their services to help my growth on LinkedIn. First of all, I don't, I think personal brands should be personal but also it's people with like 2k-3k followers.

Maybe I'm missing something but if I was going to buy help from someone to build my brand, I'd want them to have a big personal brand themselves. The same if I was going to work with a PT, I'd want it to be someone already in great shape. You wouldn't learn how to drive from someone without a license so why do we apply a different logic in other sectors.

A lot of founders really overcomplicate the first couple of minutes of a pitch. They get too far down in the detail on tech or TAM or future plans and none of that moves the dial at the start, you need to get emotional buy in from the recipient before you get down into the detail.

The founders that nail it keep it really simple:

1️⃣ This is what we do.

2️⃣ This is the tangible benefit to our customers (either we add X to their revenue or decrease Y from their costs).

3️⃣ Our customer is [...], the economic buyer within our customer is [...] and this is how we find them.

It doesn't need to be any more complicated than that. Investors aren't looking at all the investor chat straight out the gate, all they want to know is what you're building, why your customers need it and who and where can your customers be found.

I'm meeting more and more founders who don't need anywhere near as much investment cash as they first think. After someone walks me through their business and their pitch, one of the first questions I ask is:

If you don't raise, what will that mean for the business and do you have a Plan B?

More often than not, the founder then goes on to articulate a Plan B whereby if they don't raise investment, or they raise significantly less, they can actually still progress the business based on dragging forward future revenue, selling some consultancy or more manual services.

When the question is then posed of 'do you really want to spend the next 3-6 months trying to raise a round with limited metrics or do you instead want to go out and get funded by customers' there's often a realisation that Plan B might actually be the best Plan A.

I'm not saying this is right for every business, if you have a highly technical product (especially if you're a hardware or DeepTech business) or if you're building in a super competitive market then maybe fundraising is the best option.

All I'm saying is stop and ask yourself the question for your business, do I really need to raise or am I just doing it because that's what all the headlines are suggesting I do.

I'm making a U-turn with my content strategy.

A couple of weeks back I shared that I was no longer going to be posting on the weekends, planning to cut down to just posting on the week days to give me a bit of time back and a couple of days of total downtime each week.

However, it isn't really working.

First of all, I've been punished by LinkedIn and my reach across all posts is down by c.90%. I realise this might be just a timing thing and once I'd have done it for a few weeks it would probably have levelled back out but it's still a factor.

The more important reason though is I'm not doing too bad for content ideas and things to talk about at the moment and I've had enough ideas recently to be scheduled out for over 4 weeks. There's no real fun writing something today that doesn't go live until a month or two so it's time to jump back in and post on the weekends too.

One thing I will be keeping up with though is not worrying about replying to comments on the weekends, those can certainly wait until Monday.

One of the most ridiculous things that's ever been said is: sell painkillers not vitamins.

I hear it on podcasts, I see it on LinkedIn, there's at least two people that mention it at any VC or tech event that I go to, it's absolutely rife.

LVMH sells designer goods, no level of painkiller whatsoever, and they’re one of the top 30 companies in the world by market cap.

Whoop, a c.£4bn valuation business, is the ultimate vitamin, it's helping you stay healthier for the future.

Is Facebook really a painkiller? Does it solve a deep visceral problem? Maybe for their ad customers but for the general users? It doesn't really help you keep in touch anymore than a WhatsApp group (appreciating WhatsApp is now owned by Facebook but that's a different story).

The list goes on and on, maybe it made sense when first said but in today's market if you can make people's life a little easier, or you can make them feel a bit better about themselves, there is likely a market opportunity for you.

I often find founders start with a default assumption that they should be fundraising. Some of them are right but, in my experience, a greater proportion would be better off taking another route.

This week we look at how we got here (i.e. why is raising the default for so many), what it really takes to successfully fundraise in today's market and if being VC backed is really the right thing for you and your business.

I know it absolutely drives some people mad but I don't leave any meetings now without asking what are the actions, who owns them and when would be an appropriate time period to chase them for closing them off. As soon as we wrap, I then add to my diary to chase them on that day.

It sounds pedantic and often things do get done long before I chase but it's a discipline I don't think I'll ever get out of now. Everyone is super busy, things slip, all of our memories are variable but having a clear system to ensure the big things really get done is a massive differentiator in my opinion. If there's no actions being done, there's no real point in the meeting.

One of the things I think, and am hoping, we are going to see in abundance in 2026 is a reduction in the amount of software vendors that sell annual or multi-year commitments.

This isn't 2021 anymore, people aren't willing to tie themselves in to products that work today but could quickly be sub-standard, given the rate of innovation, in a couple of months.

I've never liked long term SaaS commitments, it drives poor behaviour internally in my opinion. If you've got a killer product and you're all in on continuing to improve it, stop leaving money on the table by locking customers out that won't sign up to a long term commitment, get them on a one month rolling contract and back yourself to continue to deliver.

Ever wondered what a typical VC due diligence process looks like and/or interested in my view on why I think the majority of the time due diligence destroys more value than it creates? Check out this week's episode of Unconventurenal!

One of the most common mistakes I see funded businesses do is they go out and hire everyone in their hiring plan within the first couple of weeks of the round closing. On one hand, I get it, the round itself has been a tough slog and you're looking forward to getting some help.

However, there's always a big drop off in productivity during and immediately post any hiring spree, as you have the recruitment process itself that's a time drag and then you have the training and onboarding burden and, when you hire quickly, you also usually find that you haven't filled every role with quality.

Just because it's in the plan doesn't mean you need to go out and do it all overnight, in my experience you don't want to be growing any particular team by more than 20% in any given quarter, the training and onboarding time steal from the core team is just too much.

Even though I'm not a VC anymore, I still meet a lot of startup and scaleup tech businesses each year. So, of the businesses that I met last year (outside of my clients, as that'd be just a shameless plug!) who were the most exciting?

🔘 I love what both urfuture are doing to look to reinvent the failing recruitment market. No Gen-Zs want to upload a generic CV to one of the incumbent portals to then never hear back from anyone. Tom and the team are focussed on using video content and behavioural science to match people to careers they'll enjoy, thrive in and stay in for longer.

🔘 On a similar theme but not exactly the same, I'm also a big fan of hiyrd and what James Boyd is doing, building a new professional social media platform that focusses more on video and audio content instead of written content, again helping the TikTok generation stand out professionally with the skills they've learnt personally.

🔘 Whilst I'm often a little sceptical of MarTech as a category, I'm excited by what Brandon and the team are doing at ViVV LABS Marketing. There's so much wasted marketing spend for business and this is a big problem to solve. Most others I've seen in this space have been looking to build something 100% productised from Day 1 and that's a recipe for disaster in my view. The in-house experience ViVV are using to build a tech enabled solution first and a PLG solution second is a way smarter strategy in my view.

It really scared me the other day when I heard a lecturer talk about needing to find a solution to stop people using AI when doing coursework.

Is that really the answer or is the answer to start teaching people to do things that AI can't do? If AI can do it today, it's highly likely you're not going to be able to get a job doing it in 3 years time.

If one of your new year's resolutions is starting to post more content you need to start with a system, it can be basic but a system none the less.

How do I do it?

I've got a long list of content ideas on Notes on my phone that I add to when I get an idea (could be on the back of meeting a founder or listening to a podcast or reading someone else's content that sparks an interesting thought).

Every week or two or I sit down for somewhere between 2 and 4 hours and flesh out a good chunk of those, usually 6-12 into full posts and schedule them out (just on the native LinkedIn scheduling tool, you don't need to pay for anything!).

Some people might be uber creative and can just sit down and come up with an idea and a full post on the fly but that isn't most of us. Most of us will find it a lot easier by putting a little bit of structure in place.

I've got on the vibe coding train over the last couple of weeks and it's been super interesting, though not in the way I first thought.

The outputs from what I've been trying to build haven't been great. I think that's a twofold problem, both what AI can do still has some serious limitations and the learning curve is actually way steeper than most people think it is.

However, some of the interesting things it has shone a light on:

1️⃣ I think every non-technical person working in a tech business should give it a go, mainly as it shows how difficult it really is to ask a tech team to build a feature. How many times do you see a sales or marketing person go mad when the feature they've asked for comes out completely different. What I'm learning is the devs (or AI in this case) actually does a good job of building what you ask for, we just don't do a good job of asking for what we want, with sufficient detail.

2️⃣ All of us need to be thinking about how we can systemise what we do. As an example, AI notetakers are useful but how many of us ever go back to those notes? Very few. Instead of them sitting there in a drive to never be used again, we need to be thinking how we can feed that into AI as training data to help us become more efficiency. It's hard because we're all super busy but it's getting to the point where if you want to compete you're going to have to invest the time upfront to become more efficient knowing the payback over the longer term will be huge.

As any business scales, people think that the hardest thing is learning the new things that you didn't know before. That isn't easy but it's always equally as hard to continue to do the things you used to do well now you have a bigger business and a bigger customer base.

The CEO of one of my clients said something that stuck with me a couple of weeks ago:

'When we were small, we won new customers based on the service we gave, over my dead body will we start losing customers because of the service we give now we're bigger.'

Everyone's looking for the things they need to change, sometimes the real beauty is having the discipline to remember to do what brought you success in the first place.

When it comes to raising your first round, there's a lot more to think about than just the valuation. There's a plethora of things that can catch you out that make a great valuation look not quite as attractive as you may have first thought.

If you want a summary of the other things you should be looking out for, check out this week's episode of Unconventurenal.

I'm not really one for new years resolutions but purely from some extra downtime in December I had a big realisation that we spend so much of our time focused on trying to do multiple things and being hyper productive that it often leaves us with very little thinking time.

Since the turn of the year I've been trying to only do one thing at once and give myself more time to be bored and actually think. When I say one thing at once I mean things like: not listening to a podcast when walking, just walk and think; not listening to the radio every time I'm in the car; not two screening when watching tele and doing something else on your phone.

It's took me a while to realise but the modern world really is designed to distract us from our own thoughts and that drives way too much autopiloting and not enough clarity.

The one funny downside is when the mind is allowed time to wonder you can get the most random of thoughts, some of mine have been:

🔘 Evolutionarily when did life get so comfortable that we started to style our hair? Hair is essentially one of our bodies waste products, how have we turned it into a fashion accessory?

🔘 Why hasn't anyone solve the problem of collecting data pan-retailer in physical stores? Everyone has their own store card but why have one of the EPOS providers, card providers or someone else not figured out how to collect it centrally?

🔘 Driving is one of the most inefficient times in our week. Will the improvement in AI, especially voice, allow us to start sending emails and working whilst traveling safely, or will mass adoption of autonomous win the raise? Personally my money is on AI over autonomous.

Anyway, they're my strange thoughts from giving myself more thinking time. It's also allowed some more productive thinking like: what do I want to get out of today, what can really move the dial this week, how do I want to approach the meeting I'm on my way to, etc.

Give it a try, I think you'll find it as helpful as I have and if you want to come back to share any of your own strange mind wandering thoughts, feel free.

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