IBA CEDIR hosted a session for SAP founders built around the premise that investors do not fund a founder’s story, they fund their metrics. Led by Fatiq B. Khursheed, CFA, the session moved past the profit and loss statement and into the specific metrics investors actually evaluate when assessing a startup, including monthly recurring revenue, cohort retention, customer acquisition cost payback, burn multiple and net revenue retention.
Founders in the session compared their own numbers against global benchmarks to understand what qualifies as healthy performance and what signals a potential red flag to investors, giving them a clearer sense of how their metrics would likely be interpreted by outside evaluators rather than relying solely on internal assumptions about their business’s health. This kind of external benchmarking is often difficult for founders to access independently, making structured sessions with practitioners familiar with investor expectations particularly useful.
Participants also defended their assumptions under investor style questioning, a format that simulates the kind of scrutiny founders can expect to face during actual fundraising conversations. This practical, pressure tested approach gives founders a chance to identify weaknesses in their reasoning or data before encountering those same questions from an actual investor, where the stakes of an unprepared response are considerably higher.
The session also covered building valuation approaches suited to a company’s specific stage, recognising that valuation methodologies appropriate for an early stage startup differ meaningfully from those used for more established, revenue generating companies. This stage specific approach to valuation reflects a broader effort to move founders away from generic valuation formulas and toward frameworks genuinely suited to where their company sits in its growth trajectory.
The session concluded with a clear takeaway that every founder needs a live dashboard demonstrating their investment readiness on an ongoing basis, rather than assembling relevant metrics only when actively fundraising. This point reinforces a theme running through IBA CEDIR’s recent programming, that investor readiness is not a one time preparation exercise but a continuous discipline founders should maintain as a standard part of running their business.
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