How to develop your spiky point of view (and why most founders never do)
Investors see thousands of founders a year and most of them sound the same. The ones who get funded have a specific, defensible, slightly dangerous point of view about why the world works the way it does, and why they're the ones to change it. Everyone else gets polite passes.
The technical name for this is a spiky point of view. It is the single most important thing you can develop before you walk into a fundraise, and most founders never do.
This post is about why that is, and how to get yourself into the right headspace to write one that actually works.
What a spiky point of view actually is
A spiky point of view is one that is open to criticism. You firmly believe in it. You are prepared to fight for it. It is your thesis on the area you know best, and your original reasoning for why you will win.
Every founder has a distinct perspective on the world, shaped by the totality of their knowledge, abilities, personality, and instincts. Your spiky point of view is how that perspective shows up in your business. It demonstrates the motivations behind your choices, and that you are critically analysing the world instead of repeating what everyone else in the room is repeating.
It is also almost impossible to imitate. That is what makes it a competitive advantage. It is rooted in your conviction and your authenticity, which is also why you already have it in you. You just haven't pulled it out yet.
What separates a real one from a fake one:
It can be debated. Others should be able to disagree with it. If everyone you share it with nods along, it's too middle of the road. Most founders are scared of being truthful about how they see the world, in case someone disagrees with them. You cannot let this happen to you. Some investors will disagree with your view. That is the point. Your job is to find the investors who think the same way as you.
It isn't controversial for its own sake. There is nothing more irritating than a contrarian who just wants to stir the pot. It is intellectually lazy and investors can smell it from the first sentence. A spiky point of view is a considered position rooted in something specific you have seen, built, or lived through.
It teaches something. Don't summarise information. Offer a point of view that makes the listener see the problem in a new way. You want them to think "I hadn't thought about it that way, but this is true, and it is making me rethink a lot of things."
It is rooted in evidence, but it doesn't have to be a proven fact. Your perspective should be defensible. You should believe in it enough to advocate for it. But you have to be okay with people disagreeing. If you wait for one hundred percent consensus before you say it out loud, that day will never come.
It requires conviction. You have to be brave enough to advocate for what you believe. There is a stance of advocacy and a bias toward action. You are trying to convince someone because you genuinely believe they will be better for it.
Why most founders never develop one
Fear. Specifically, the fear of rejection from investors.
If you share your spiky point of view, investors might disagree with you. You might end up being wrong. So most founders default to the safer option, something almost every investor will find broadly reasonable, and in doing so they sound exactly like every other founder in that investor's pipeline.
Some of that concern is valid. Sharing your spiky point of view requires boldness. You may encounter rejection because of it. It will force you into difficult conversations about your business. If you don't have your own point of view, you'll start to sound like everyone else, and you become forgettable. Investors do not fund founders they cannot remember when they're writing up partner meeting notes that night.
The second reason founders fail is subtler. They sit down, write a first draft, realise it sounds generic, and stop. They assume the genericness means they don't actually have a spiky point of view, that they're not one of those founders.
The first draft is supposed to be generic. That is the raw material. The finished thing comes later, during refinement, when you add the mechanism, strip out the product language, stress-test it against smart people who push back, and notice which version makes someone lean forward in their chair. The act of refining is what sharpens your thinking. It is what lets you articulate what you actually believe.
This is why mindset and vision work has to happen long before you think about fundraising. You have to think deeply about what you are trying to solve and why you are doing it the way you are doing.
Four questions to sit with before you start
You are about to do the work of writing your own. Before you open a blank page, sit with these four questions. They are four overlapping ways into the same territory, worded differently on purpose to pull a response out of you.
- What are three to five spiky points of view you have about your industry?
- What do you believe about your company and the problem you are solving that others might disagree with?
- What do you wish more investors understood about your space? It should be something that makes you a little angry or frustrated. Conviction and emotion matter here. If you are ambivalent about it, it is not worth your time to convince others.
- What have you said to customers, colleagues, or investors that made them say "I hadn't thought of it that way. This is so true and it is making me rethink a lot of things"? That moment is your POV in the wild. Pay attention to it.
Your first answers will probably be mild and vague. That is normal. Refine and iterate based on feedback. Ask friends and coworkers, post about it, talk to real customers and investors. Let the market respond.
Sharpen it into unique insights
A spiky point of view stays an opinion until it becomes a unique insight, and the difference is mechanism. A unique insight is your understanding of what will solve the need better than everyone else's approach, learned from something you have seen, built, or lived through.
The case I use to teach this is Uber against Kabbee. Both looked at the same broken taxi market. Kabbee's read was that taxi companies needed digitalising. Uber's read was that the winning mechanism was a seamless user experience, which meant controlling driver supply directly rather than aggregating existing firms. Same market, same trend, two different insights about the mechanism, and only one of them was right. Spotting a trend is not an insight. Understanding the mechanism that wins is.
The raw material is usually knowledge you consider ordinary. Tessa Clarke at Olio understood food waste behaviour, and ran a distributed team years before COVID made that normal. When my fund invested, those everyday-to-her insights were a real part of what pulled investors in. Ask yourself why your industry has failed to solve this problem, and what you know that explains it. Then say it in public. Write about it, speak about it, put it in front of people who can argue back. Sharing the thinking is what turns a private view into a reputation, and investors fund people who are already known for an idea. One test before you fall in love with an insight: it has to be surprising to smart people in your space, because an insight that just makes logical sense to everyone is a description, and descriptions don't differentiate you.
Where it all has to lead: an investable vision
Your spiky point of view and your insights exist to power one thing, the vision, because the vision is what an investor is buying at exit. From reviewing thousands of pitches, the visions that got funded did three jobs at once.
Big. It takes the same effort to build a modest company as an enormous one, so tell the big story. A rational, manageable narrative feels safe to you and reads as a small outcome to a fund that needs each investment to be capable of returning it. Big visions are also what attract the employees, the journalists, and the later investors.
Inevitable. Start from facts your investor already agrees with, then stack evidence that the world is bending away from that baseline, until you arrive as the logical consequence of where things are going. Urgency belongs here too. If climate advocates said "the climate is kind of bad," nobody would move. They say the world will burn. Your problem framing needs that level of felt urgency, backed by your evidence.
Uncontroversial. Odd word for a page about being spiky, but the spike belongs in your view of the market, never in the plausibility of your plan. "We'll land on Venus in ten years" gets you shown out. A staged journey where each step is credible gets funded. Anchor the vision with a beachhead: we win this specific wedge first, because the pain is ten times worse there, and the mechanism carries everywhere else. That framing turns "niche business" into "platform starting in a focused wedge."
The two mistakes that undo all of this: leading with what you do instead of why it matters, and overcomplicating the story. Keep the vision simple enough that the investor can retell it to their partners without you in the room. That retelling is the moment your point of view either survives or dies, and it connects directly to how the decision gets made (how investors actually decide to invest).
Now go and write yours
Your goal in fundraising is not to make every investor like you. It is to make the specific investors who will be on your cap table like you. Big difference.
A spiky point of view is the filter that makes that happen. It attracts the right investors and repels the wrong ones, which is exactly what it is supposed to do. You will know yours is working when investors lean in, ask you to keep going, and want to hear more about you and your company.
Safe is forgettable. Forgettable does not get funded.
Head into the exercise. Write your first draft knowing it will probably be too safe. Then refine it until it isn't.
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