The author of this post is Julien Petit

In every other domain of entrepreneurship, we take it for granted that the entrepreneur must deeply understand their customer. It’s obvious. If you’re selling to large enterprises, you learn their procurement cycles, their pain points, their internal politics. If you’re building for developers, you become obsessed with their workflows, tools, and expectations.

So why do some VCs still believe it’s acceptable (perhaps even preferable) for founders not to understand the venture capital game?

This is not just a minor flaw in reasoning. It reveals a dangerous asymmetry of expectations that contradicts the very logic of what it means to build and lead a venture-scale company.

Let’s break this down.

1. A VC is a client. Period

Founders often hear that they shouldn’t “build for VCs.” Fair. But let’s not twist this into thinking that VCs aren’t customers at all. If you’re raising venture capital, you are selling something, equity in your company, or in plain english: shares of your company, and your buyer is a VC.

And in any business, the bare minimum requirement for success is knowing your customer better than anyone else. Their incentives. Their constraints. Their risk appetite. Their economics. Their worldview.

Would you trust a founder building a SaaS product who doesn’t deeply understand their end user, how they think, what they need, how they actually use the product? Of course not. So why should it be any different when raising venture capital? It’s not just about knowing how VCs allocate capital, it’s about understanding how they think, how they make decisions, what constraints shape those decisions, the state of the market they’re operating in, their economic model, and whether that model is even working. If you don’t understand that, you’re not speaking their language.

Asymmetry of information is a liability. Sophistication is a duty.

2. Capital is not optional

There’s another hard truth: if you’re aiming to build a category-defining company (VC jargon to say a billion dollar company), you will need capital. Not once. Repeatedly. Over years. And not in random amounts, but at strategic inflection points, often under pressure, in volatile markets, against smart competitors.

One of the primary responsibilities of a CEO is to make sure the company never runs out of cash. This isn’t a one-time fundraising effort, it’s a long-term strategic function. That means understanding capital markets becomes as essential as understanding product, go-to-market, or hiring.

The CEO who fails to master this domain is abdicating a core part of the job.

3. Sophistication is not a luxury

The idea that fundraising knowledge is a “nice to have” is not just wrong, it’s irresponsible.

Sophisticated founders don’t just “get lucky” with fundraising. They understand the psychology of decision-making. They know how funds work. They tailor their narrative not to flatter the investor, but to match the investor’s strategy. They anticipate objections because they understand portfolio theory. They speak the same language, not to manipulate, but to build trust.

The best founders don’t just raise money. They run a fundraising process. They manage fear, scarcity, momentum, dilution, cap table dynamics, and round timing like a chess grandmaster, not a hopeful amateur.

4. VCs got unfortunately used to the asymmetry

Let’s be honest: many VCs have simply adjusted their expectations downward. They’ve gotten used to working with founders who don’t really understand the venture model. Not because they prefer it that way, but because if lack of sophistication were a disqualifying factor, they’d have far too few deals to fund.

Part of that is structural: capital needs to be deployed. And when most founders haven’t taken the time to grasp how venture really works, fund construction, return profiles, power law dynamics, investors work with what’s in front of them. For a long time, the assumption was that founders would learn by doing, that they’d pick things up along the way. And maybe, ten or twenty years ago, that was good enough. But today that type of believe doesn’t work. In any high-performance field, what was tolerable yesterday becomes a liability tomorrow. Venture is no different. So over time, sophistication became optional. The bar got lowered, quietly, almost by necessity.

But part of it is cultural. When one side of the table doesn’t speak the language, the other side owns the narrative. And that asymmetry starts to feel… comfortable. Not deliberately, but it creates a subtle sense of control, even status. The VC becomes the authority by default. Over time, that comfort calcifies into habit. That habit into blind spots.

In a market starved of DPI and flooded with noise, we can’t afford that kind of softness anymore. What once passed for “founder-friendly” now risks being intellectually lazy, on both sides of the table.

5. VC literacy is not the end goal, clarity is

The goal here isn’t for founders to mimic investors. It’s not about jargon or posturing. It’s about clarity, about knowing what game you’re playing, what the rules are, and how to maximize your odds of winning it.

If the game is venture capital, then you need to understand the logic of that game as deeply as your investors do. Not because they demand it. But because your ambition and company deserve it.

Conclusion: Close the gap and flip the narrative

The venture game is not a secret club. It’s a system with rules. And the founders who take the time to understand those rules don’t lose their authenticity, they increase their leverage.

So no, it is not acceptable for founders to be naïve about venture capital.

And no, VCs should not accept that either, unless they prefer founders who are easier to manipulate, more reactive, and less capable of steering billion-dollar companies through the fog of scale.

Sophistication is not an option.

It’s a prerequisite for truly fueling your ambition.

The author of this post is Julien Petit

“Cutting Through The Noise” by Mighty Nine

Do you have a compelling story to influence the best VCs?

We are a VC fundraising investment bank.

Mighty Nine