Guest lecture by Vincent Choquet, founder of RDY Ventures - a 20M EUR early-stage VC fund based in Antwerp. He invests “the first professional ticket” - typically when a startup has a few users, is pre-revenue, and is just starting to validate the opportunity. Background: did corporate finance at EY, became a CFO, then started his own ventures (including French Kiss Club - wine in a can), now runs RDY full-time. Has been on both sides of the table.
The lecture is mostly practical advice from a VC who actually writes checks at the earliest stage. The big themes: relationships matter more than money, valuation is the wrong thing to obsess over, and AI has fundamentally changed what early-stage looks like.
Innovation is the core of investing
The reason VCs exist is because people want to build things. Innovation rarely happens inside big corporates - too many rules, budgets, and limitations. It happens in startups.
Why now is a particularly good time to start something:
- Pandemic shifted mindsets toward entrepreneurship
- AI tools (Lovable, Base 44, Replit, Cursor) make it possible to build an MVP in hours without writing code
- Inflation eats stagnant money, so growth (= innovation) is necessary just to stand still
- Belgium specifically has a high rate of new business formation (close to US levels), partly driven by the freelance/management company structure
In this environment, showing up to a VC with just a presentation is no longer enough. There’s no excuse for not having a working MVP.
The three things the best startups do
- Prove product-market fit as cheaply as possible (build an MVP, give it to users, iterate)
- Get the right type of fundraising early on (this is the topic of most of the lecture)
- Manage uncontrollables by building culture early - if the founder dynamic feels off from day one, it won’t get better. Don’t pay for therapy on a bad relationship. The same applies to investors: if you don’t gel with them early, you won’t gel with them in 7 years either.
The funding wheel - 4 basics to get right
These four things together unlock someone’s willingness to write a check. They’re interconnected, hence the wheel metaphor.
Mission: solve a relevant problem. Critical distinction: be obsessed with the PROBLEM, not the PRODUCT. If you’re problem-obsessed, you’ll build something useful. If you’re product-obsessed, you’ll build something you like that nobody needs.
People: build a team that believes in the vision and can deliver. Solo founders are still viewed skeptically by most VCs - the emotional load is too much for one person. Three founders is statistically the optimal number, though more solo founders are emerging.
Product: develop with the customer in mind, not in your own head. Test with real users early. People love giving feedback - it’s free.
Funding: attract the right type of investor at each stage. Start from the END (how much money do you need) and work backwards. Tools like Claude can build your P&L, cash flow, and balance sheet now - so there’s no excuse for not having a proper plan.
Why VCs want to see your business plan
The plan will be wrong. Everyone knows it will be wrong. So why ask for it?
Because the plan is a window into how you think:
- What variables you consider important
- How you see the future
- How fast you think you can convert pipeline to paying customers
- What assumptions you’re making about cost allocation
Common founder fallacy: people overspend on what they know.
- Technical founders overspend on tech
- Ex-McKinsey founders overspend on customer service / sales / consulting
- The plan reveals these biases
What VCs actually test: are you reluctant to change your mind when challenged? You should be a sponge for feedback, but keep your North Star (mission and vision) intact. Founders who pivot at every VC meeting will never succeed.
Also crucial: simulate, don’t assume. Don’t say “we’ll get 1M ARR in 12 months” without breaking it down into P x Q (price x quantity) and validating with 5-6 potential customers whether they’d actually buy.
What goes in a good plan
- Clear, simple business model
- Unit economics (P x Q)
- 3-5 year metrics
- Validated assumptions (talk to experts and potential customers)
- Cash allocation breakdown
- Funding amount sized to cover 18-24 months at best case
Visualize everything. The reason to use models when you have variables is they help communicate. Using models without variables is just elaborate hallucination.
Risk drives return - matching investor type to stage
Different sources of capital, different ticket sizes, different return expectations:
- Friends, fans & family: small tickets, expect >10x (or nothing)
- Business angels: small-medium tickets, high return expectations
- Venture capital: medium tickets, high return expectations
- Private equity: large tickets, lower returns
- Stock exchange: large tickets, return above inflation
The earlier the risk, the higher the return premium needed. VCs typically need 7 years before they get rewarded, and 1 year to know an investment is going to zero. They push companies to fail FAST because pouring more money into a known loser is worse than writing it off and moving on.
How to qualify the right investor (5 filters)
Don’t waste time pitching investors who can never invest in you. Five things to check before reaching out:
Business model: B2B investors don’t invest in B2C, period. Don’t try to convert them. Some early-stage funds do both. B2G (business-to-government) is rising due to defense contracts.
Market: early-stage VCs are agnostic (any sector). From Series A onward, VCs specialize (MedTech, FinTech, etc.). At Series B+, they often pick ONE vertical only. Don’t pitch a FinTech VC if you’re MedTech.
Funding amount: if a VC’s minimum ticket is 1M and you need 750k, they will not invest. Match your ask to their range.
Financial vs strategic: financial investors want returns, end of story. Strategic investors (Corporate VC like Bosch Ventures, Samsung Ventures) may have ulterior motives - blocking competition or scouting for acquisitions. If you’re building something that competes with their parent company, steer away.
Location: people like proximity. Even in 2026, location matters. Belgian companies typically get first money from Belgium, then maybe Nordics or US. A Turkish VC investing in an Antwerp startup is rare because they’re not in the ecosystem.
Case study - the typical messy funding journey
Vincent showed a real example of a company that raised >40M total but did it inefficiently across many rounds. Why inefficiently? Because that’s the game - VCs want each round to hit a milestone that BUMPS the valuation. If you raised 20M upfront, you wouldn’t get those valuation bumps.
So the structure is typically: seed → angel(s) → VC A → VC B → VC C → Corporate VC. Each round is supposed to fund 12-18 months and hit a milestone before the next round.
The danger zone - 500k to 1M
Critical practical insight: if your business plan needs ~750k, REWORK IT. Either bring it down to 500k or push it up to 1M. Why?
- Below 500k: angels can cover it (typical angel checks: 50-250k)
- Above 1M: VCs start writing tickets
- Between 500k and 1M: too big for most angels, too small for most VCs - you’ll waste months pitching the wrong people
Match your ask to what your target investors actually write.
Working with angels - be careful
Angels have a real function (they often write the check just before a VC will), but they come with risks.
- They start emotionally - they like you, they know the market
- After your first VC round, the paper valuation becomes “real” to them, which can change their behavior
- They can become a pain to manage as the company grows
- Do due diligence ON THEM - check references, check if they fought with other founders, check their reputation
- If an angel has a bad name, get the 50k from someone else. Don’t bring extra complexity into something that’s already hard.
Same lesson with strategic investors. Vincent took money from Samsung Ventures expecting strategic projects that never materialized. Cost the company a lot. He admits: they assumed because of the brand name they didn’t need to do due diligence. NEVER assume.
European VCs vs US VCs - surprising data
Counterintuitive finding: European VCs actually OUTPERFORM US VCs on net annual returns across 5, 10, and 20-year horizons.
Why? US investors take bigger risks - they invest huge amounts in big ambitions, which means more spectacular wins but also more spectacular losses. European investors are more conservative, but apparently better at picking and nurturing investments. We’re “wired to take less risk” (5 years in school before trying anything we don’t like is the cultural marker).
This is a generally good thing for European founders: there’s plenty of capital here, the picking is better, and the ecosystem is solid. No excuse for “I have to go to Silicon Valley to raise.”
What you actually get from a VC (beyond money)
A good VC adds value beyond cash:
- Intros to other investors (co-investments, follow-on funding)
- Strategic input on market entry, pricing, scaling
- Hiring support (C-level, recruiters, board)
- Partner intros (distribution, customers)
If a VC is just money with no value-add, take someone else if you can. The right VC is a multiplier on your effort. The wrong one is just expensive capital.
Important reframe: getting funded provides credibility, NOT validation. A LinkedIn post saying “we raised 1.5M” doesn’t make customers want to buy from you. SAP isn’t going to switch to your CRM because you raised 1.5M. Validation only comes from customers paying you. Don’t confuse the two.
The layered ecosystem - which to use when
At the IDEA stage:
- Venture studios: build startups from scratch with in-house teams (Rocket Internet, StarApps). Take 30-80% equity.
- Incubators: shared space, mentoring, no/little equity (Start It @KBC, university incubators)
- Startup competitions: prize money + visibility, often no equity. Vincent’s pick if you’re starting fresh - cheap, public, and good for awareness.
At the EXECUTION stage (you have an MVP, users, maybe one big customer):
- Accelerators: programs + mentoring + small money (Y Combinator, Imec.istart). Take equity (typically 5-10%).
- VC funds: institutional money for high-growth (Sequoia, Index, RDY)
- Corporate VC: corporate money with strategic angle (Google Ventures, Bosch Ventures)
- Family offices: wealthy families investing directly
- Crowdfunding & syndicates (Seedrs, AngelList)
- Growth/PE: larger checks for scaling profitable businesses
Common mistake: founders with just an idea pitch VCs. VCs need users, traction, SOMETHING. If you only have an idea, stick to studios, incubators, or competitions until you have proof.
Why RDY Ventures exists
There’s a gap in Belgium: the first institutional/professional VC ticket has historically been 1-2M. RDY fills the space below that with 100k-500k checks for very early companies (pre-revenue, but with users and an MVP).
The thinking: with AI tools available, founders no longer need 5-10M for a first round. They can build with much less. The first hire today is a salesperson, not a machine learning engineer (because AI handles the tech). This shift makes smaller, earlier rounds viable.
Old metric of pride: how many people you’ve hired (50, 100, 1000 employees!). New metric of pride: ARR. Lovable went from 0 to 400M ARR in a year with a small team. That’s the new shape.
How RDY operates
- Fast capital cycle: apply → pitch → invest in 3 weeks (vs months at most VCs)
- 5 selection rounds per year
- Then 12 months of structured support: VP sessions, fund check-ins, offsites, networking
- Fund structure: General Partner (decides) + Investment Committee (validates) + Supervisory Board (oversight) + Venture Partners (sourcing & support)
Career path note: Venture Partner is typically the entry point into VC. You prove you can source good deals and add value, then you progress to General Partner.
How RDY selects (and probably how most early-stage VCs select)
Team:
- Complementary co-founders (more than one founder = higher success rate)
- Founder-market fit + problem obsession
- Ambition is a proxy for resilience - ambitious people don’t give up
Tech: agnostic. Software or hardware, any sector. They invest in the team and the opportunity.
Market:
- Must be obtainable
- Must have tailwind (timing matters)
- Must be BIG ENOUGH from the start - small problems in tiny markets are not worth investing in, even if they’re solved well
Funding need: must be sized correctly for the business plan. Cash allocation must be qualified (justified). Opportunity must be above the fund’s expected return.
The hidden rule of VC support: support is INVERSE to need. They double down on winners (push them harder), not on strugglers. This is opposite to private equity, where you help the struggling companies because PE is leveraged and EVERYONE loses if they go down. In VC, you only make money on winners (the power law), so it’s better to write off losers fast and concentrate effort on the ones that are working.
Current state of the VC market (2026)
- Dry powder is available, but deployed more slowly than during the 2021 peak
- Fewer deals overall, but average deal size is up
- Valuations have normalized post-2021 (good for entrepreneurs entering now, painful for funds that invested at peak valuations)
- Capital efficiency and profitability are in focus (was growth-at-all-costs before)
- Hot sector: AI (65% of new dollars). Lots of “AI washing” - companies pretending to be AI to get funded.
- Climate was hot 2 years ago, now cold (Trump anti-climate stance demotivated buyers). Vincent’s fund still has climate companies they believe in long-term, but the market opportunity went from high to low fast.
Outlook trends:
- Rise of vertical-focused / specialist funds (because startups are also building point solutions, not full suites)
- New financing models: revenue-based financing (release tranches based on hitting ARR milestones), secondaries (funds buy stakes from older funds whose lifecycle is ending)
- AI-driven diligence: VCs themselves use AI heavily now. RDY runs the fund with 3 people doing the work of 10 thanks to AI tooling.
Important investor reframe: “Valuation equals happiness.” VCs don’t really do DCF on a pre-revenue startup - too few variables. They calculate backwards from a target exit value (5x, 10x, 20x), and that determines what valuation makes them happy at entry. The real DCF work happens later, when there’s actual revenue to model.
Physical AI - the next big trend
Vincent’s recommendation if you have time this weekend: look up what Travis Kalanick (Uber founder) has been building for 8 years. Physical AI - applying AI to physical things - is the trend they see emerging.
The logic: as AI optimizes everything that can be digitally optimized, the value increasingly sits in the un-optimized parts (the physical bottlenecks). Whoever solves those captures most of the value. Finance backgrounds are useful here because you can spot bottlenecks better than technical people who just want to keep optimizing what’s already been optimized.
Closing thoughts - the relationship test
Vincent’s closing line: “Before you marry someone, make them use a computer with slow internet to see who they really are.”
The whole lecture comes back to this. Building a company with co-founders, taking money from investors, hiring a team - these are 7-10 year relationships. You need to know how someone behaves under stress, with frustration, when things go wrong. NOT when everything is going smoothly.
Practical advice:
- Go on retreats with co-founders before you commit
- Test investors in difficult situations before signing
- If someone is known for screwing founders over or not taking your side when things get hard, do not work with them. No matter the brand name, no matter the check size.
In a world where AI handles more and more of the dumb work, relationships are the actual core of innovation. Use the AI for the rest.
Personal takeaways from the lecture
- Don’t be obsessed with valuation, be obsessed with terms and relationships (this also matches lecture 7)
- Match the investor type to your stage - 80% of pitches fail because of mismatched targeting, not weak ideas
- Avoid the 500k-1M danger zone in fundraising
- Build something with Lovable / Base 44 / Replit before pitching anyone - showing up with just slides is dead
- European VCs are actually a great option, the data backs it
- If you’re considering VC as a career, start as a Venture Partner / intern (RDY has openings - he mentioned it twice)
- Power law in VC means winners get all the attention; the math forces this
- Your finance background is more valuable than you think - in a world of AI, spotting where business value sits matters more than building the tech itself