How to make your startup stand out, according to VCs actually writing the checks

At TechCrunch Disrupt, three investors stripped startup pitching down to the studs.

Jyoti Bansal (founder-turned-investor), Medha Agarwal (Defy) and Jennifer Neundorfer (January Ventures) walked through what makes a deck pop — and what quietly kills your chances.

1. Kill the buzzword bingo

The panel’s biggest turnoff: pitches drowning in trendy jargon, especially AI.

The more a founder says “AI” in the pitch, the less AI the company likely uses, Agarwal told the crowd.

Founders actually doing something innovative with AI don’t sell it as the whole story, she said. It’s woven into the product, not the entire pitch.

Translation: If your deck says “AI” on every slide, investors will assume you’re compensating for a weak product or a shallow tech stack.

Focus your story on the problem, the product and the business — then explain concretely where AI fits.

2. Answer the three questions every investor is really asking

Bansal boiled investor expectations down to three deceptively simple questions.

1) Is the market big enough?

He starts by looking at the size and importance of the problem:

• Is there a large enough market to tackle?
• Could this idea realistically become a huge company?
• Is the problem actually worth solving?

If the upside is capped, it doesn’t matter how slick your product is — the math won’t work for venture-scale returns.

2) Why you?

Next, Bansal looks at founder–market fit.

“There has to be something unique about you,” he said, whether that’s the team’s background, rare skills or a hard-to-copy insight.

You’re not just pitching a product. You’re pitching why you’re the one team that deserves to win when, as Bansal pointed out, any interesting problem will attract “20 other companies” trying to solve it.

Ask yourself:

• What do you know or have that others don’t?
• Why are you faster, more credible or better positioned?
• What unfair advantage shows up clearly in your deck?

3) What proof do you have?

Finally, investors look for validation.

“Traction with customers,” Bansal said. That could be:

• Early customer feedback
• Revenue
• Pilots or letters of intent
• Any concrete signal that real people care about what you’re building

The form doesn’t matter as much as the message: someone outside your team believes this is valuable.

All three questions roll up into one brutal filter Bansal uses:

Could this become a billion-dollar company?

Your deck should make that path at least plausible.

3. If you’re an AI startup, this bar is even higher

The panel spent extra time on AI startups, because that category is now completely flooded.

Bansal’s take: domain expertise plus a clear competitive strategy matters more than sprinkling GPT references across your slides.

Neundorfer said the companies that get her attention are the ones that enable new behaviors, not just slightly speed up an existing workflow.

If your pitch is basically “like X, but with AI,” you’re in trouble.

Agarwal offered tactical guidance for AI founders:

• Explain how AI actually enables your product. Make the technical value legible to a non-PhD.
• Lay out a clear go-to-market. How do you get your first 10, 100, 1,000 customers?
• Show why you’re more efficient than incumbents. That’s where AI should shine in your story.

And be very honest about the competitive landscape.

Agarwal said some founders “lost some credibility with me because you didn’t have it on your slide” when it came to competitors. If you pretend there’s no one else in the market, investors will assume you haven’t done the work — or you’re not being straight with them.

4. Navigating a market that changes every quarter

The conversation closed on how founders should keep their edge as the industry shifts under their feet.

• Agarwal urged founders to stay on top of industry developments — tools, models, regulations, buyer behavior.
• Neundorfer recommended leaning on founder networks to swap what’s working: tools, tactics, and hard-won lessons.
• Bansal’s advice was the simplest and probably the hardest to follow: “Focus on building your product.”

In other words: you can’t network, buzzword and “AI-wash” your way into a great company. You still have to do the unglamorous work: ship, learn, iterate — and show up with a pitch that respects investors’ intelligence.