What a US investor asks before taking you seriously

Six questions European founders are rarely prepared for.

A European engineering company walks into a first meeting with a US investor carrying a technology story. The science is strong. The product works. The engineering is better than anything the investor has seen from a company that size.

That is not what the first meeting tests.

The investor is running a different examination. It takes about forty minutes and it comes down to six questions. The order varies and they are almost never asked directly. You are judged on your answers anyway. They decide whether the investor spends more time on your company.

1. Who is already buying from you in the United States, and why?

Not the pipeline. Not the letters of intent. Customers with orders placed, and the reason behind each one.

The reason matters more than the revenue. A single US customer who came through a personal connection is a relationship. Three customers who each arrived through a different route, for the same reason, is a market. An investor can tell the difference in two minutes.

If you have no US revenue, say so plainly and explain what you are testing. That is a respectable position. Dressing up a pilot as traction is not.

2. What breaks first if volume triples?

European engineering firms often sell a product that is standard in principle but adapted in practice. Every installation takes a senior engineer. The margin is acceptable because the team is small and very good.

The investor is working out whether the business grows without multiplying the people who build it. Usually the answer is that delivery capacity breaks first, and usually the founder knows it.

Say it. An honest constraint is a fundable problem. A constraint found in diligence is a reason to withdraw.

3. Who runs the US business, and are they already hired?

A US strategy with no US person is a plan. Investors discount plans heavily, because they have watched this specific hire go wrong many times.

It goes wrong in two directions. A senior commercial executive is hired to open the market and spends a year building a function nobody asked for. Or someone junior is sent to represent a company with decisions all made five thousand miles away, and the customer works that out immediately.

The investor wants a named person, a defined mandate, and a reporting line. If that person does not exist yet, know what the role is before you are asked.

4. What would it cost someone else to do what you do?

This is the question about the “moat” that protects your company.

Founders answer with the technology. It is almost always the wrong answer, because a well-funded competitor can match the technology in eighteen months and both sides know it.

The real answer is usually less glamorous. Certification evidence accumulated over a decade. A place inside a customer workflow that nobody will replace. Reference installations in a regulated sector where the approval took three years. Test data that cannot be bought.

Know which of these you actually have. Then lead with it.

5. Who has to agree?

European cap tables carry things American ones do not. A regional development bank. A university holding from a spin-out agreement. A family shareholder from the second generation. A legacy investor with a veto nobody has thought about in years.

None of this prevents a deal. Discovering it in week six does. By then the investor has spent money on diligence and has learned that you either did not know your own shareholder structure or chose not to mention it. Both readings are bad.

Put the structure on the table early, with the consents you will need and who grants them.

6. What happens if you step away for three months?

This is key man risk, and it is the question owner-CEOs answer worst.

The honest answer is often uncomfortable. Sales stops, because you are the relationship. The roadmap drifts, because you are the arbiter. The board does nothing, because the board is your own executives.

Saying this out loud does not weaken your position. It is read as maturity, and it tells the investor part of what their money is for. Claiming the company would run smoothly reads as naive or evasive. It also invites the diligence that proves otherwise.

All six questions test one thing. Is this a business, or a project that would be hard to grow profitably?

The companies that pass are rarely the ones with the best technology in the room. They are the ones whose founder has already asked themselves these six questions, found three uncomfortable answers, and is doing something about them.

That work takes months. It should start well before the first meeting.