How to Talk VC
I was at a VC panel the other day, and after practicing deliberate and deep listening, all I heard was “VC-speak.” So, I wrote a playbook for aspiring VCs.
This is how you talk VC.
Speak fast, because slower speech invites follow-up questions, and follow-up questions are the enemy of vibes. The VC who speaks at 2.3x podcast speed is the VC who closes the round. Pause too long and someone might ask you to define “moat.” You cannot afford defining things. You have to assume that everyone knows what you’re talking about. So speak fast.
Master the Eternal Funnel of Abstraction. Start with something real, like a juice company, and within 90 seconds, you should have transformed it into a “category creator with negative working capital benefit, low-CAC micro-influencer distribution, a data moat built on engagement loops, and a direct-to-consumer flywheel with meaningful payback compression.” The juice is now a capability. The “customer” is now a unit. The founder is now a zero-to-one operator with “maniacal focus.”
Learn the Sacred Ratios. At some point, someone will say “unit economics” with the gravity of a person who has just personally invented math. What they mean is: how much does it cost you to get a customer, and how much does that customer pay you back. This is the “CAC-to-LTV ratio.” Definitely use the phrase CAC-to-LTV with confidence, because confidence is more important than sense. If you’re a founder, you can respond to the CAC-to-LTV question with something like: “We’re seeing strong CAC-to-LTV dynamics with three-times payback on a 12-month timeframe across our core acquisition channels” makes it sound like you are operating at a frequency most humans cannot access. That is the point.
Build the Moat, then Protect the Moat, then Talk About the Moat. “What's your moat?” and “What's your competitive advantage” is the VC equivalent of asking someone their star sign. It sounds rigorous, but it is mostly vibes, and the answer is always predetermined. The correct response is “data moat,” delivered with a pause that implies you have more data than you are allowed to discuss. Bonus points for adding “and our moat deepens with every incremental user interaction,” because “network effects” is something VC-speak must have.
Deploy the Right Adjectives. There are six adjectives in the VC dialect and they must be rotated carefully: maniacal, meaningful, enterprise-grade, category-defining, thoughtful, and tremendous. You are not focused. You are maniacally focused. The cost savings are not large. They are tremendous. The product requirements are not serious. They are enterprise-grade. The pivot was not panicked. It was thoughtful. Use these words the way a chef uses seasoning, and with full confidence that no one will ask you to justify them.
The Team. Always the Team. Most VC conversations end the same way. After 45 minutes of capital strategy, roadmap scrutiny, cap table optimization, and downstream planning perspective, VC speak is to lean back and say: “At the end of the day, it comes down to the team.” Always the team. You need all-purpose athletes. People who are bilingual, meaning they can talk to engineers and also talk to enterprise clients without having a visible breakdown. People with the right DNA. Using the word DNA is important. Because somewhere, in the “organizational genome” of this “seed-stage” startup, is a “double helix” of destiny, and the job of the VC is to find it and back it.
At the end of the day, that's the “core value proposition.”