Why 97 Investors Said No to My Spreadsheet (And One Said Yes to My Story)

I stood in that lounge with a glass of wine, my friend’s question hanging in the air: “Why do you keep going?”

Ninety-seven rejections. My house sold. Sleeping on a friend’s floor. Each VC meeting had followed the same script—polite interest, thorough review of my financial models, then silence.

“Because I believe it will work,” I told him. “If Gore-Tex can build a consumer brand for waterproof and breathable, I can build one for soft, flexible, and protective.”

That’s when it hit me.

I was living in a completely different world than every investor I’d pitched.

Two Worlds, Two Languages

In the World of What Is, decisions require evidence. You need proof, data points, customer validation. Revenue. Market traction. The measurable confirmation that something works.

In the World of What Could Be, decisions start with belief. You see the future as clearly as the chair you’re sitting in (or the floor you’re sleeping on). Vision guides you forward before any evidence exists.

For eighteen months, I’d been trying to drag my incomplete, unproven idea into their world. I had credible business plans. Compelling financial models. But they were hypotheses dressed up as certainty. I had made nothing. Sold nothing. Had zero customer conversations confirming anyone would buy it.

The VCs weren’t wrong to say no. I was speaking the wrong language.

Why Our Brains Choose Stories Over Spreadsheets

Here’s what I didn’t understand: humans didn’t evolve to make decisions with spreadsheets.

For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors made life-or-death choices based on pattern recognition and narrative. The rustle in the grass meant a predator. The story of where the good hunting / foraging grounds were kept the tribe alive. We survived by believing compelling narratives and following people who could paint a clear picture of what was possible.

Numbers and data analysis? That’s a recent invention. A thin layer of rationality painted over decision-making machinery that runs on belief, emotion, and story.

Even today, investors like to think they’re logical. They’ll tell you about their due diligence process, their evaluation criteria, their financial models. But that’s not how they actually decide. They decide when something clicks emotionally—when they can see what you see, when your belief becomes their belief.

The spreadsheet just gives them permission to act on what they’ve already decided.

The Ten-Minute Believer

I changed my approach entirely. Instead of building evidence I didn’t have, I focused on transferring belief.

The next wealthy investor gave me ten minutes. I told him the amount I was raising and made the Gore-Tex comparison. Then I hit myself on the knee with an avalanche shovel—a thin pad of d3o hidden beneath my suit trousers.

“I don’t need to see the business plan,” he said.

I braced for rejection number ninety-eight.

He called the next evening. “I’d like to invest £500,000.”

Ten minutes. One believer. No spreadsheet required.

He didn’t invest because the numbers added up. He invested because he could suddenly see the world I was living in—where soft body armor would be as ubiquitous as Gore-Tex. Where protection didn’t mean bulk, it meant freedom. Where d3o was already real, just waiting to be built.

The Seed-Stage Founder’s Trap

At the earliest stages, perfect financial models are a mirage. They create the illusion that you can prove something that doesn’t exist yet. They keep you trapped in the World of What Is, trying to manufacture evidence for a future you haven’t built.

But you cannot generate the proof early-stage investors think they need. That’s the entire point of being early-stage.

What you can do is drag them into your world. Make them feel what you feel. Help them see what you see with such clarity that belief becomes inevitable.

This is why we say: You need a Minimum Viable Brand just as much as a Minimum Viable Product.

Your brand isn’t your logo or your messaging. It’s the belief system you create around what doesn’t exist yet. It’s the world you invite others to inhabit. It’s the story that rewrites someone’s understanding of what’s possible in ten minutes instead of eighteen months.

The Question That Changes Everything

Are you living in the world of what is, or the world of what could be?

Because here’s the truth: you can’t build the future from inside the world of what already exists. And you can’t convince people to fund the future by showing them better math.

You do it by activating the oldest decision-making machinery we have. You tell them a story so clear, so compelling, that their brain does what it was designed to do for millennia.

It believes.