What I Look For Before Writing a Check

After investing in 40+ startups across Poland and Central Europe, here is what I actually evaluate before writing a check. This is not the polished version I give at panels. This is the real filter.

The founder’s relationship to the problem

This is the first thing I look at and the hardest to fake. Does the founder understand the problem from direct experience? Not from market research. Not from a McKinsey report. From having lived inside the problem.

When I started PizzaPortal, I did not study the food delivery market. I was ordering food and the experience was broken. I understood the pain because I was the customer. That kind of intimacy with the problem produces better products, faster iterations, and more resilience when things go wrong.

I ask founders: “How did you discover this problem?” The answer I want to hear is a story. A specific moment. “I was working at a logistics company and every week I spent 6 hours manually reconciling shipment data because our system could not talk to our partner’s system.” That answer tells me more than a 20-slide deck.

The answer I do not want: “I did market research and found that the logistics software market is growing 15% annually.” That tells me nothing about whether this person will build something customers actually need.

Market structure

The market needs to be large enough for venture returns and structured in a way that a new entrant can win.

I do not need a TAM/SAM/SOM slide. I need to understand three things: who pays for this, how much they pay, and how many of them exist. If those three numbers multiply to something above 100M EUR, the market is large enough.

Structure matters more than size. A 50B EUR market dominated by two entrenched players with long-term contracts is harder to enter than a 500M EUR market with fragmented incumbents and no switching costs. I look for markets where the existing solutions are bad enough that customers will switch to something new without being forced.

Timing is part of structure. Why can this company exist now and not five years ago? Usually the answer is a regulatory change, a technology shift, or a behavioral change. If there is no clear “why now,” the company is either too early or too late.

The economics, even rough ones

At pre-seed, I do not expect polished unit economics. I do expect the founder to have thought about them.

Can you charge enough per customer to cover the cost of serving them? How much will it cost to acquire a customer? How long will they stay? Even back-of-napkin answers to these questions tell me whether the business model can work.

Founders who say “we will figure out monetization later” are building a project, not a business. I invest in businesses.

The exception is marketplace models, where early unit economics are almost always negative because you are subsidizing one side to build the other. In that case I want to see the path to positive unit economics: what the steady-state looks like once both sides are at scale.

What I do not prioritize

The product itself. At pre-seed and seed, the product will change. Sometimes dramatically. I care whether the team can build, not whether what they have built today is good.

Team size. Two founders with complementary skills are better than six people who are all doing the same thing. I have seen solo founders succeed. I have seen teams of eight fail at pre-seed. The question is not how many people. It is whether the right capabilities are covered.

Traction as an absolute number. 10K EUR MRR means nothing if I do not know the CAC, churn rate, and growth trajectory behind it. 2K EUR MRR with 0% churn and 20% month-over-month organic growth is a better signal than 50K EUR MRR with 15% monthly churn and paid acquisition that does not pay back.

The things that make me say no

Founders who cannot explain their unit economics, or worse, do not think they matter yet.

Founders who blame external factors. “The market was not ready.” “Our first developer was bad.” “COVID killed our momentum.” These might all be true. But founders who externalize failure rarely fix internal problems.

Cap tables with 15 angel investors from a pre-seed round and no lead. This tells me nobody was willing to take a meaningful stake, which usually means nobody believed enough to take real risk.

Pitches that are 80% technology and 20% customer. I have sat through 30-minute meetings where the founder showed me system architecture for 25 minutes and mentioned the customer once. That is backwards.

Founders who are raising for the third time without clear progress between rounds. Pre-seed to seed should show product-market fit signals. Seed to A should show scalable growth. If neither happened, more money is not the answer.

The decision

After all of this, the actual decision comes down to a simple question: do I believe this founder will figure it out?

Not “will the product work.” Not “will the market develop.” Will this specific person, facing the inevitable problems they have not yet imagined, find a way through?

That is what the check is for. Everything else is a filter to get to that question.

/Lech