What investors look for in a startup with no track record

Picture a partner at a fund opening your pitch deck, the slides you send before any meeting, somewhere between two calls. At the end of 2023 DocSend measured an average of 2 minutes and 24 seconds per deck. In 2025 it still put the figure under three minutes. That’s your first meeting, and you aren’t in it.

So what investors look for in a startup has to be visible fast. It’s harder when you’ve never raised money and there’s no exit (a company you built and sold) on your CV. In the next eight minutes you’ll see what the research says investors weigh most, what you can show instead of a track record, which red flags end the conversation and what they check once they’re interested.

What investors look for in a startup first: the people

First money raised in Italy will probably come from business angels (people who invest their own savings), and angels rarely decide alone. In IBAN’s latest survey, reported in June 2026, 81% of the deals tracked were syndicated, meaning several investors came in together, with six angels per deal on average. You’re convincing a small committee. Each member forms a view of you on their own.

The biggest study of how professional investors choose is American, and it points the same way. Paul Gompers, Will Gornall, Steven Kaplan and Ilya Strebulaev surveyed 885 venture capitalists at 681 firms for a paper published in the Journal of Financial Economics in January 2020. The management team was the factor mentioned most often: 95% of firms cited it, and 47% ranked it first.

The business wasn’t far behind. Business model got 83% of mentions, product 74%, market 68%. But when the same investors looked back at their winners and losers, they gave the team more of the credit, and more of the blame.

Nothing suggests that has changed. In DocSend’s 2024 reports on more than 400 pre-seed and seed startups, investors spent 40% more time on the team slide at seed than the year before, and 30% more at pre-seed.

Why so much weight on people? At pre-seed there’s often no revenue to analyse, and the product you pitch today may look very different in a year. The founders are the part that stays.

How picky are investors, and how fast do they decide?

Very picky. In the Gompers study, venture capital (VC) firms looked at roughly 100 opportunities for every deal they closed. Only 10% of their deals came straight from founders; the rest arrived through the investors’ own networks, other investors and the companies they had already backed.

That doesn’t make cold outreach useless, and our guide to writing a cold email to investors shows how to do it properly. It does mean the first read is a filter. Your deck has to make sense in a couple of minutes with nobody there to explain it, which is why the order of the slides matters: here’s the pitch deck structure most investors expect.

The average deal in that survey took 83 days to close. What fills those weeks comes further down.

No track record? What first-time founders can show instead

No exit, no big-name employer, no previous round. Investors meet first-time founders every week and don’t expect the CV of a serial entrepreneur. What they want is evidence that you’ll learn faster than the problem gets harder.

Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, wrote in 2010 that determination “has turned out to be the most important quality in startup founders.” You can’t put determination on a slide. You can show what it leaves behind.

What the investor is really asking	What you can show	Example (invented startup)
Why you?	Founder-market fit: years inside the problem, direct access to the customers	Seven years as a physiotherapist in Bologna before building booking software for clinics
Can you build?	Speed: what you shipped in the last 90 days	Prototype in three weeks, first paying clinic in week nine
Do you listen?	Interview notes and what you changed because of them	40 interviews: the patient app was dropped, the clinic dashboard kept
Does anyone want it?	Traction, the measurable signs of demand: waitlist, pilots, letters of intent, first revenue	Three paid pilots at €150 a month and two signed letters of intent
Do you know your numbers?	A model whose figures match the deck and the bank	The same monthly revenue in all three places
Will you tell me the truth?	Risks named before anyone asks	“Our biggest risk is how slowly public hospitals buy.”

A letter of intent, by the way, is a signed but non-binding note in which a customer says they plan to buy. It isn’t revenue. It still beats a compliment.

Investors also test one thing in the room: coachability. It doesn’t mean agreeing with every comment. It means changing your mind when the data says so, defending the plan when it doesn’t, and writing back a week later with what you did about the feedback. For the figures that belong in your model, the metrics investors ask for at seed are a good starting point.

Red flags that end the conversation early

• Numbers that don’t match. Slide 6 says €8,000 a month, the model says €6,500 and the bank says something else. It’s usually sloppiness rather than fraud, but from the outside the two look identical.
• A crowded cap table, the table of who owns what. Picture a co-founder who left after four months but still holds 30%, or an adviser who got 15% for a few introductions: not much is left for the people doing the work.
• Code or brand the company doesn’t own. A freelancer built the app and nothing transfers the rights? Then your main asset sits outside the company.
• “We have no competitors.” Your customers already solve the problem somehow, even if it’s with Excel and WhatsApp.
• Bad news that turns up in the checks instead of being told in the meeting.
• A valuation copied from a headline, with no link to your traction or to how much you’re raising.

What due diligence looks like at a first round

Due diligence is the investor checking that what you told them is true. In later rounds that means lawyers and accountants for weeks. In the Gompers survey the average deal took 83 days to close, and firms spent 118 hours on due diligence and called ten references along the way.

At pre-seed, the very first outside money, it’s lighter. The questions are the same, though. Does the company exist as described? Who owns it? Does it own its product? Do the numbers hold up, and will customers confirm the story on a call?

For an Italian SRL, part of the answer is public. The visura camerale, the company extract from the Registro Imprese, lists the directors and the shareholders. SRLs haven’t kept a shareholders’ book since 2009: the register itself is the official record of who holds the quotas, and investors will compare it with your cap table line by line.

A basic data room is just a shared folder that answers those questions before anyone asks them:

• Company: visura camerale, atto costitutivo and statuto (deed of incorporation and articles of association), any patti parasociali (shareholders’ agreement).
• Ownership: a cap table that matches the register, plus any SAFE or convertible note already signed, since both turn into shares later.
• Team and intellectual property (IP): employment and freelance contracts, and the documents assigning code, designs and brand to the company.
• Numbers: the financial model, last year’s accounts if there are any, recent bank statements.
• Customers: contracts, pilots, letters of intent and a one-page metrics sheet.

Our data room checklist goes through it folder by folder. The guide to startup due diligence covers what changes between seed and Series A, the first large VC round.

Your checklist before the first investor meeting

1. Write one sentence about what you do and for whom.
2. Pick three proofs from the last 90 days: something shipped, something learned, something sold.
3. Check that deck, model and bank statements agree to the euro.
4. Download a fresh visura camerale and compare it with your cap table.
5. Make sure every contract with developers and designers assigns the IP to the company.
6. Write down your three biggest risks and what you’re doing about each.
7. Line up two customers who’d take a call from an investor.
8. Set up the data room folder now, not after a meeting goes well.

This guide is one stop on our beginner’s map from zero to a first round. The stop before it covers raising your first €50,000 from friends, family and angels. Right after it comes why startups fail, where several of the red flags above show up again. Finished the map? Next comes our guide to raising capital in Italy: who invests at each stage, and how a round is put together.