Financial Immaturity

Game Over. Insert Coins. No More Coins.

I need to get this off my chest. I’ve been biting my tongue. I’ve let things slide when I shouldn’t have, and now it’s hitting back.

It slows down. It weakens. It blinds. It kills.

It’s Financial Immaturity.

We give entrepreneurs millions. It marks the beginning of a new chapter, one focused on adoption, traction, or growth. But no matter who they are, or whether they’ve raised capital or not, every founder faces the same universal challenge: mastering two deceptively simple things, easy to understand yet hard to master :

Managing people and managing money.

And too often, it falls apart.

It’s almost predictable. Most founders, especially first-timers, underestimate the difficulty of managing humans. Not just hiring, but leading real people. People with egos. With weaknesses. With resistance to change. With confusion over goals. Misaligned motivations. People who hear one thing when you say another. Who interpret your silences. Who mirror your insecurities.

And if you don’t take ownership of how your organization communicates, learns, and executes, you're done. It’s not a question of if, but when.

And if you survive, give credit to luck and karma, not precision of execution.

But here’s the kicker. As hard as managing people is, it’s not even the biggest failure point I see. The real killer, the slow-motion cliff jump, is how badly many founders handle money.

And it’s not just a knowledge gap. It’s a maturity gap.

Some founders treat capital like it’s not real money. They spend, they don’t invest. They scale without foundations. They grow headcount like it’s a proxy for momentum.

I’ve seen companies throw away millions like it was nothing:

Hiring C-levels they didn’t need. Keeping underperformers because they came early, became friends, or just stuck around. Growing too fast and slowing down too late. Overengineering products before product-market fit. Running ads that weren’t tracked. Expanding abroad before owning their home market. Contracting without understanding their sales motion or even their margins.

Money burned on the altar of bullshit.

And look, I get it. No one teaches this in school.

But when you raise €2M, €10M, €20M, €50M or more, you don’t get to plead ignorance. The startup game is ruthless. It doesn’t care about your intentions.

You either build a business that makes sense, or you don’t.

And when it falls apart? It’s devastating. Not because we lost money. We can live with financial loss… Well, not all of them, let’s be honest.

What I struggle with is the sense of failure. Our failure as investors to make it clear enough, early enough, loud enough that they were on the wrong track.

With people, we can help from the sidelines. We can offer perspective, flag patterns, hold up the mirror. But ultimately, it’s their call. And that’s fair. But Finance is visible. It’s trackable. It’s knowable. We see what’s happening in real time.

And yet, too often, we watch in silence.

Because we don’t want to be the asshole investor.
Because we still want to believe the founder will figure it out.
Because there’s still cash in the bank, therefore time.
Because the issues are buried in the fine print.
Because we tell ourselves it’s not our job to take the wheel.

But maybe it should be.

There are three options when we see it happening:

1 - Say something, but stay passive. Hope the founder hears you. Hope they take it seriously. Hope they don’t just nod along and go back to the mess.

2 - Intervene. Open the books with them. Challenge every line. Push. Not suggest. Push. Hard.

3 - Take control. But let’s be real: we’re not operators. That’s not the role of venture capital. Our job is to believe in people capable of becoming exceptional stewards of people, of capital, of time.

And that’s the heartbreak.

When someone had everything, the product, the market, the timing, and they fuck it up because they didn’t care enough to learn the basics.

Because they thought the CFO would fix it.
Because no one taught them that leadership is operational discipline.
Because they didn’t understand that nothing kills a startup faster than tolerating mediocrity in people, in data, in decision-making.

I’ve watched founders ignore underperformers because firing is hard. I’ve seen them let politics rot teams because confrontation is uncomfortable. I’ve watched them pretend the numbers were fine because facing the truth would mean facing themselves.

And every time, I told myself it wasn’t my place to push harder. That they had to learn. That failure was part of the journey.

But deep down, I knew.

This wasn’t failure. It was negligence. It was avoidable.

And when you see it up close, it’s gut-wrenching.

Thankfully, I’ve also seen the opposite.

I’ve seen founders cut their headcount in half, rebuild from the core, and come back with twice the growth and ten times the clarity.

I’ve seen teams who understand their numbers with absolute clarity. Who hire well, fire quickly, and build organizations that want to win, not just say they want to win.
Who are ruthless with focus, careful with burn, and obsessed with performance.

They feel like pros. Because they are.

I got an email this morning from one of them. A new deal we’re leading. Not a first-timer. A second-time founder. The kind who knows. The kind who doesn’t hide behind optimism. Who faces reality like a boxer.

I know we’ll build together for a decade.

He has that rare thing: real maturity.
Maturity with people. Maturity with numbers.

It’s irresistible. It’s what makes startups work.

But for every one like him, there are five who crash the plane because they didn’t read the altimeter. I can’t go through that again. Not like before.

I’ve been hurt by it. Personally.
I’ve felt like a fraud.
I’ve felt like a failure.
I’ve felt like I let them down.

And I did.

I didn’t say it loud enough.
I didn’t intervene early enough.
I thought they’d figure it out.

So this is me, saying it now. Loud and clear.

If you’re a founder, you don’t get to overlook these things.

You don’t get to ignore the warning signs.
You don’t get to say I’m not a finance person. You become one. Fast.
You don’t get to say I’ll fix it later. Later might not come.
You don’t get to tolerate the wrong people. They will kill your momentum.
You don’t get to overspend and call it growth. That’s not growth. It’s delusion.

You are building a high-performance machine with no safety net.
Mistakes are expensive. Time is limited. Nobody’s coming to save you.

So please. Get serious. About people. About data. About money.

Because the next time your startup dies from financial immaturity, I won’t feel bad for the cap table.

I’ll feel bad for you.

For what you could’ve built.

For what we all lost.