From virtue to sin: the approach that does not travel

There is a certain mindset that many founders from the post-Soviet business world bring into Western fundraising rooms, and it costs them deals they should have won. It is not the lack of preparation — in fact, quite the opposite. It is the residue of a particular perception of how to be taken seriously, and that approach, when exported, produces the wrong impression.

A founder from Moscow, Kyiv, Minsk, Almaty, Yerevan, or Riga learnt early that numbers were their main allies. The cultural memory is strong: in the institutions that shaped parents (and grandparents) of today's founders, data was safe and words were dangerous. A spreadsheet didn't need to have an opinion. Reporting upward — to a director, a ministry, a regulator — meant presenting figures cleanly and letting the figures speak. To explain them was to expose yourself.

This approach was considered virtuous at the time. In 2026 it still produces some of the most numerically rigorous founders in the global venture ecosystem.

Western institutional investors read this discipline as something else entirely.

A partner from a London growth fund described it to me last year. He said the founder he had just met "wouldn't tell me what he thought." The founder in question had spent forty minutes presenting a clean cohort analysis, a defensible CAC story, and a model that survived three rounds of questioning. The partner came out of the meeting unsure whether the company believed in its market. He read the founder's restraint as evasion. In his world, a founder who is reluctant to interpret his own numbers is either hiding something, or hasn't come to a conclusion yet, or — worst of all — hopes the data will bring out the decision so he doesn't have to make one.

The founder was doing none of it. He had brought fair evidence and expected that it would be eloquent enough. He was being entirely professional in the way his training recognised. Ironically, that was the very reason the deal died.

The asymmetry runs deeper than presentation style. It shapes what the two sides treat as load-bearing in a conversation. In the post-Soviet operating tradition, the strongest statement a founder can make is a verified number — because the institutional environment taught everyone that words are cheap and figures are not. In the Anglo-American venture tradition, the strongest statement a founder can make is a clear position — because the operating environment suggests that data is plentiful and judgement is scarce. The two cultures are not disagreeing about rigour. They are disagreeing about where the burden of proof sits.

This is why generic pitch advice doesn't fix the problem. A founder who is told to "lead with narrative" will produce a narrative that sounds, to him, like marketing. He will rightfully resist it, because what he is being asked feels like the unprofessional move he was trained out of making. The fix is not to teach him to talk more, but to redefine what talking is for. In the cultural context he is now in, interpretation is not a fancy wrapping around the data. It is the product. And the numbers are there to show that the product works.

The founders who embrace this transition seamlessly have spent enough time inside Western companies, or with Western boards, to have witnessed a senior executive answering a hard question — the answer almost always starts with a position, then justifies the position, then offers data. Not the other way around. They have learned to mistrust their instinct nudging: show the figures first, lead with the trump card. That instinct brings silence on the other side of the table — in venture, this is how "no" quietly enters the room.

None of the above is a critique of the method itself — the discipline is real, and at a later stage, when due diligence stops being a conversation and starts being a forensic exercise, it becomes a significant advantage. The companies that survive the data room well are run by founders who were never tempted to round up. The problem is in the part of the process where the deal is still being decided by people, not financial models. There, the founder's instinct may work against him. And there, he needs to know why.