Why Founders Matter More Than Decks
When I first started building HUMN, I was convinced I was behind. I didn’t have a financial model. I didn’t have a pitch deck. I didn’t know how raising capital actually worked. All I had was an idea and a long list of things I didn’t understand yet.
So I did what most first time founders do and went straight into output mode. I started building documents, studying templates, asking for examples, and trying to make everything look the way I thought it was supposed to look. I assumed that if the plan was good enough, the numbers made sense, and the deck was polished enough, the rest would take care of itself. It took me a long time to realize that I was solving the wrong problem first.
The Plan Is Table Stakes
You need a business plan, a financial model, and a deck. None of that is optional. It’s how you show you’re serious and how you create a shared language with investors. But here’s the part that took me the longest to understand…
Those things don’t close capital. They qualify you for the conversation. What investors are really doing in those early meetings isn’t underwriting your spreadsheet. They’re underwriting you. They’re watching how you think and how you answer questions when you don’t know the answer yet. How you respond when something doesn’t go your way. How you talk about risk, timing, and uncertainty. I used to think they were looking for certainty and now I know they’re looking for calibration.
What Investors Are Actually Pattern Matching
At some point, one of my prospective investors asked me a question that changed how I thought about the entire process.
“So why you? Why do you think you can do this?”
It wasn’t a challenge but a signal. He wasn’t asking about the idea. He was asking about the operator behind it. Over time, I started to realize that most serious investors are pattern matching. They’re not betting on a single plan. They’re betting on whether the person across the table can adapt when the plan breaks. That’s why experience, skill set, and network compound together.
My experience in corporate America taught me how systems actually work and how process creates leverage. How organizations scale without falling apart and those are things you don’t learn in a classroom. You learn them by being inside messy, imperfect systems and watching what actually holds them together. The skills that came with that time weren’t just technical. They were human. How to work with engineers, advisors, customers, and executives. How to read rooms and manage energy. How to build trust over time.
And then there’s the network…
A REAL network. The people you can call when you don’t know what to do next. The people who’ve already lived the problems you’re about to face and will tell you the truth about them. That’s what investors are really looking at when they decide whether they trust you with their money.
The Founder Is the X Factor
Anyone can get a space and put things into it. Anyone can copy a service model. Anyone can replicate technology. What can’t be replicated is the person building the company. That’s why I keep coming back to the difference between a company and a brand. A company is something you transact with. A brand is something you believe in and belief doesn’t come from slides. It comes from consistency, judgment, and how someone shows up over time. This is also why your WHY matters more than people want to admit.
If your only goal is to make money, entrepreneurship is going to feel unbearable at certain points. Money takes a long time to show up. The low moments show up immediately. When things stall, when deals fall apart, when timelines slip, your why is the only thing that keeps you steady. That’s the part investors are watching for. They want to know whether you’re going to disappear when the first real wall shows up or whether you’re going to recalibrate and keep going.
Why This Changed How I Building HUMN
Once I understood this, everything about how I approached building HUMN changed. I stopped trying to sound impressive and started trying to be accurate. I stopped hiding what I didn’t know and started naming it early. I stopped optimizing for the deck and started optimizing for decision making. That shift made the conversations better. It made the relationships deeper and it also filtered out the wrong capital. The best advice I got was from the managing partner of a venture capital firm.
“Don’t ask for money. Ask for advice.”
That one sentence reframed everything. When you ask for advice, you invite someone into the process. When you ask for money, you turn it into a transaction. Don’t get me wrong…
Plans matter. Models matter. Decks matter. But founders matter more.
Because when the market shifts, when assumptions break, and when the plan stops working, the only real asset left is the person who has to build the next version of it.
