I remember standing at a networking event, listening to a founder pitch. I couldn’t quite follow what the company actually did, but whatever it was, it was going to be huge, world-changing, category-defining, and obviously worth a billion. Pre-revenue, naturally.
I’m happy for people who can live in that atmosphere. Some founders are wired for it: they speak fluent unicorn, raise eight-figure rounds off a deck, and genuinely enjoy the game.
Then there’s our side of the room. We live mostly in the under 20M lane. We build off revenue, not rounds. We don’t sound like the “visionary founder” on the cover of Wired, but if you put three of us at a table, we’re talking in the same shorthand within minutes.
If you live in a tech town, you’ve probably seen the face people make when you answer the “So how much have you raised?” question with “Zero.”
It’s a mix of confusion and mild horror, like you just said you enjoy dial-up internet and cash.
In tech culture, raising capital is treated as achievement; being a boring, profitable company is almost a character flaw. If you’re not gunning for 100M+ and a documentary, people genuinely don’t know what to do with you.
In our lane, the scoreboard is simple: cash in, cash out, payroll goes through, margin isn’t lying, and we actually speak to customers.
There is no slide where the line suddenly shoots up because we decided it should. The graph looks however it actually looks. Sometimes it’s a staircase. Sometimes it’s a big jump. Sometimes it’s a shrug and a realignment.
Our “pitch deck” is usually a mix of P&L, the latest product iterations, sales retention and projections, and whoever on the team is least allergic to adjectives that day.
Founders in this lane tend to run the same questions on repeat:
What is the actual product? The thing people keep paying for when the quarter isn’t great.
Who is the customer? The real one, not “everyone with a phone.”
Why will they adopt it? And “because it’s great” doesn’t count once you’re past launch week.
What’s already been proven? By data, not by enthusiasm.
Where does the money actually come from? Show me the line on the statement, not the slide.
Which assumptions are load-bearing? As in: if this turns out to be wrong, what breaks this month?
Most of us can’t afford to treat these as theory. We understand the financials almost as well as our accountants — not because we’re gifted, but because if something drifts too far, we feel it in the real world.
And then there is the financial planning layer: we build a war chest to extend runway, siloing funds for the big moves. Some of us have lines of credit and may never use them. Maybe that’s the real tell — we quietly like having more freedom.
We operate differently.
One side is built to swing for the fences: years of negative cash flow, constant raises to stay alive long enough to win. Our side is built to stay alive and stay sharp: make profits, short feedback loops, war chests. We’re optimizing for freedom — to scale at a pace that makes sense. Neither is superior. It’s different physics. The problem starts when you feel like you’re failing because your profitable company doesn’t look like a funding story.
If you’re the person at the event thinking, “I don’t understand half these decks, and I’m not sure they do either,” you are not alone.
It may be less glamorous to build a company that is not shooting for centicorn, decacorn, soonicorn status.
For some of us, it’s not a consolation prize to build in our markets. It was the goal in the first place.