A yes costs an investor a board seat and ten years of attention. That is the real price of what you are asking for, and it explains most of the passes that seemed to come from nowhere.
Before your first call starts, an investor has already read three things about you that are nowhere in your deck, and two of them you can no longer change.
Nobody evaluates your company in the abstract. They compare it to the last forty decks they saw in your category, and you never find out which forty those were.
Your company carries four risks at once. Only one of them is the risk your next round is actually buying down, and the deck usually defends a different one.
