VC diligence questions that kill seed rounds

Most decks do not die with a dramatic “no.” They die in the silent pass — when partners share an objection you never heard. The questions below are the ones that usually sit behind that silence.

1. What falsifies your core axiom in 90 days?

If you cannot name a concrete falsification test, partners assume the thesis is unfalsifiable storytelling. Amateur trap: “We’ll iterate based on customer feedback.” Stronger: a metric, threshold, and kill criteria.

2. Who bundles this for free — and why won’t they?

Platform gravity is the default. If Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, or OpenAI can ship a “good enough” feature, your UX lead is not a moat. Show switching costs, data gravity, or a workflow wedge they cannot casually copy.

3. What is real CAC when channels saturate?

Early adopter CAC is not scale CAC. Partners probe payback periods under rising competition for attention. Amateur trap: projecting linear CAC forever from a founder-led pipeline.

4. Why won’t buyers stick with the status quo?

• Workflow inertia and switching costs
• Procurement risk and security review friction
• Internal champions who lose political capital if you fail

5. What do you believe that 95% of the market disagrees with?

Consensus TAM slides signal commodity thinking. Non-consensus insight with a path to prove it is what Tier-1 partners actually underwrite.

6. Walk me through contribution margin at scale

Forensic CFOs ignore top-line excitement. They want COGS, services load, support burden, and what breaks when volume spikes.

How Dialectic prepares you

Dialectic generates lethal questions per thesis, flags amateur trap answers, and lets you rehearse spoken defenses in the Hot Seat with grading for directness and evidence — so the first time you hear the hard question is not in the room that matters.