How VCs See You in 2026

Recently, @Product Hunt published our article about how pre-seed fundraising changed in 2026.

The biggest shift of the last few years:

AI dramatically reduced the cost and speed of building products.

Because of this, the signals investors optimize for have changed as well.

In the article, I openly talk about what we see inside Unicorns Club after watching hundreds of founders try to raise funding. I even share some of the traction thresholds and benchmarks investors inside our community increasingly expect to see.

You can read the article here:
https://medium.com/@producthunt/the-new-pre-seed-harder-to-get-in-more-reward-if-you-do-0ac247ea5f0c

But I think many founders still underestimate one thing.

When an investor puts money into a startup without PMF, they are not investing only because the company has good metrics. In 2026, that is already basic hygiene.

What investors are really buying is what Marc Andreessen once called primal drive — the internal force that gets a founder out of bed when everything starts falling apart.

They are buying what Omri Drory calls founder intangibles:
how quickly a founder adapts hypotheses, whether they evolve from conversation to conversation, whether they can learn faster than others.

Do they have what Peter Thiel called determinate optimism?

Do they have what Paul Graham described as being relentlessly resourceful?

At Unicorns Club, we see something interesting:
sometimes investors reject calls even when a startup fully passes their metric filters on paper.

Because metrics are only the first layer.

The second layer is the founder:
learning speed, clarity of thinking, ability to evolve, depth of market understanding, consistency, resilience.

And this is exactly why we are now building toward a product that helps founders systematically create investor signals.

A product that helps:
• get pre-seed startups to seed
• turn MVPs into PMF
• turn ideas into traction

And maybe most importantly:
make the founder’s second layer visible to investors.

💬 Curious:
If you had an AI board / AI coach working with you daily — tracking your progress, pushing your thinking, helping with decisions, research, prioritization, fundraising, product strategy, and accountability — what would you want it to help you achieve first?

• getting to your first revenue?
• turning an idea into a real product?
• reaching PMF?
• preparing for fundraising?
• becoming more consistent and focused as a founder?
• something else?