what do investors look for in founders? eighty episodes

what do investors look for in founders? not whether the idea is good, which a page can show, but how you think under pressure and whether you change your mind when you should. eighty underway episodes show that, in order, private until you send them.

eighty episodes is the most thorough due-diligence artefact a founder can hand anyone. that claim is on the underway site, and this is what it means and what it does not.

not a deck. not a timeline written afterwards with the ending already known. the days themselves, in order, told by you, while they were happening: what you were working on, what broke, what you decided and why, what you said you would do next, and then, an episode later, whether you did it.

each episode is your answers cut together in the order you said them, with your name and the episode number on the front and the filming date carried wherever it appears. afterwards you can drop an answer you would rather not include. you cannot rewrite the year, because nothing is reordered and nothing is added, and that is exactly what makes the archive worth watching to someone deciding whether to back you or join you.

think about what an investor or a senior hire is actually trying to find out. not whether the idea is good; they can judge that from a page. they want to know how you think under pressure, whether you change your mind when the evidence changes, whether the story you tell in the pitch matches the story you told yourself on a tuesday in march. eighty episodes on camera answer that better than any reference call, and they answer it in your favour if the record is honest, because honesty over eighty episodes is not something you can perform.

the archive is private until you send it. it lives in your vault, on your account, and nothing leaves without an explicit action from you. you can share a public page, or release individual episodes, or hold any single episode back permanently. the record is yours, and so is the choice of who reads it.

the same archive is what makes a public series findable by the right people. the directory that underway is building lists series by industry and by stage, so that being found by a relevant investor or hire is a reason to show up that has nothing to do with follower counts. series are ranked by consistency and by body of work, never individual episodes by reach, because ranking episodes would make you chase your best day and film for the hook.

the format helps here more than a highlight reel would. every episode follows the same beats, how the day started, what you worked on, what broke, how you resolved it, what it changes going forward, so eighty episodes are eighty answers to the same five questions, which is exactly how a pattern becomes visible. a reader can watch the problem beat across a quarter and see whether the problems change, or whether the same one keeps coming back, and what you did about it each time.

we don't have a customer who has done this yet. the line is on the site because that is what the product is for, and because the archive only exists for the founders who start recording before they need it. the footage from the first eighty episodes cannot be made in the week before the raise.