What an investor is really assessing in the room, and the four things that decide whether you get a second meeting.
A VC backing you at seed may be alongside you for a decade. That’s the timeframe they’re assessing in an hour, which is why the meeting is far more about you than about your slides.
We asked Hlayisani Capital co-founder and partner Brett Commaille, who has spent around 15 years in SA venture, what actually decides a first meeting…
The move: they’re assessing the person, not the pitch
Brett’s framing for how a fund thinks about a founder is unusually blunt, and it explains everything else about how these meetings run.
“We’re spouse hunting. Someone we’ll be in the foxholes with for 10+ years.”
How to pass a VC’s first meeting
1. Explain it simply, and fast
His worst-case example is a founder who got 43 slides and three hours in while he still didn’t know what the product was. What he wants instead is the version that works for, in his words, an idiot like himself: a plain explanation anyone can grasp immediately. Do that well and the read is instant, because a founder who can make it land in one sentence can make it land with a customer.
2. Be coachable without being agreeable
This is the one founders misread in both directions. He’s not looking for a yes-man; he wants someone who pushes back with valid reasons and still genuinely takes input on board. The hard fail is the founder who says yes, yes, yes in the room and then keeps going off in their own direction, which he describes flatly as a disaster. He also runs an aeroplane test: stuck next to you in economy on a 17-hour flight, is he going to want to kill you or himself?
3. Show you can fail successfully
What he hunts for is resilience, and specifically a team that can fail well. His line is that failing is good as long as it’s understood and limited in consequence, which means budgeted, planned, tested and thought through, rather than off we go. So talk about what hasn’t worked and show the structure around it. A founder who has never failed at anything reads as untested, not flawless.
4. Show that you can actually sell
Brett once backed a founder with a genuinely good idea, parcel lockers of the kind you now see everywhere, modelled on proven overseas businesses, with a draft first-customer contract already in negotiation. Two years, a merger, six contract drafts and about R1.5m later, it was dead, and nobody else would commit. His verdict: what they thought was an entrepreneur turned out to be a good inventor who couldn’t sell. The concept was right, and the business still failed, because he couldn’t sell beyond one warm relationship. Which is why Brett summarises that market is critical, but team is everything.
The big payoff
Prepare for the right assessment and the meeting gets easier: fewer slides, a plainer explanation, honesty about what hasn’t worked, and evidence you can sell. All of which happen to be the same things that make the business work whether or not the money arrives.
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Want the full story?
Brett’s full fireside from Founder Collab Live is available to members inside the Founder Collab, where he goes further than we could cover here:
Why most first sales hires are the wrong ones, and what to hire instead
How to build sales as a repeatable machine rather than a set of improvised pitches
The four types of buyer who could acquire you, and what each one pays on
Why a CEO uncomfortable with the salesperson out-earning them is a red flag
Why venture capital in Africa is early rather than broken
You’ll also get access to 40+ masterclasses from SA founders and operators on sales, fundraising, UX, paid media and more inside The Founder Collab.
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