We get a version of this pitch a few times a month. The founder is sharp. The deck is clean. The market slide is gigantic. And somewhere on slide three, the company is described as 'sector-agnostic.' Sometimes the word used is 'horizontal.' Sometimes it is 'platform.' Sometimes it is the more sophisticated 'multi-vertical wedge.' The meaning is the same, and the answer from us is the same.
We don't fund sector-agnostic. Not because the idea is bad. Often it isn't. We don't fund it because we cannot help — and at pre-seed, our help is most of what we are selling.
What sector-agnostic usually means at pre-seed
In practice, 'sector-agnostic' is one of three things. Sometimes it is a founder who has not yet picked a wedge and wants the investor's permission to keep exploring. Sometimes it is a founder who has picked a wedge but is hedging in case the wedge doesn't work. Occasionally it is a founder building genuinely horizontal infrastructure where a single first vertical would understate the addressable market.
The first two are not yet ready for pre-seed capital. They are ready for another two months of customer conversations. The third is real and rare. We have funded one version of it in the partners' angel portfolios and we would do it again. But the founder of that third version can usually articulate the first vertical with frightening specificity — they have just chosen, for product-architecture reasons, to start broader. That is a different conversation.
Why this matters for our fund specifically
We are a $5M Fund I. The portfolio will be concentrated. Each cheque is intended to be paired with substantive operator help, drawn from the partner whose lane matches the company. If your company doesn't have a lane, we have to assign the help randomly. Random help is worse than no help.
“A wedge is not a constraint. It is the smallest set of choices that allows the rest of the company to compound.”
How to know if you actually have a sector
Three questions. First: which buyer signs the contract for the first ten customers? If you have to say 'it varies,' the wedge isn't picked yet. Second: which feature would you delete to ship faster, and which would you refuse to delete? If everything is core, nothing is. Third: when you talk to a customer in your chosen first vertical, do they recognise themselves in your description of the problem in under a minute? If not, the problem statement is too general.
Founders who can answer those three are usually ready to raise. Founders who can't are usually six conversations away from being ready.
What to do instead
Pick the wedge. Write the one-sentence company description that would survive a customer interview. Send it to us. If we are not the right fund — which is fine, often we are not — we will tell you who we think is, with a real reason, in writing.