Founders rehearse what they will say and improvise who they are saying it to. That is backwards. The same studio, the same numbers and the same demo read completely differently to an angel writing a 50k check, a Series A fund deploying millions, and a publisher, who is not an investor at all. This chapter maps the people behind the money: the standard investor ladder, the publisher confusion that derails more pitches than any other mistake, and the four archetypes we found when we classified the investors in our own network.
The investor ladder, by check size
Investor categories sound like jargon until you see them for what they are: a ladder of check sizes, with a risk appetite that shrinks at every rung.
The ladder
| Investor | Typical check | What they need to believe |
|---|---|---|
| Angel | $10k to $1M | A founder they trust in a market they know. Often industry people investing their own money. |
| Seed VC | $0.5M to $5M | A strong team with a clear product vision. Proof can still be early. |
| Series A VC | $3M to $20M | A solid product and a believable path to profitability. |
| Series B and later | $10M to $50M and up | A machine that already works and mostly needs fuel. |
| Strategic investor | Varies widely | A fit with their own business: technology, content or talent they want close. |
Across every rung, the equity listener runs the same silent calculation while you talk: is there money to be made, how much, and are these the right people to make it for us. Energy, passion and authenticity win them over. Arrogance, uncoachability and salesman talk lose them.
The pattern to memorize: the bigger the check, the lower the tolerance for risk. An angel can bet on two founders and a prototype, because it is their own money and a bet they choose to love. A Series B fund answers to its own investors and cannot. Aim your ask at the rung whose risk appetite matches your stage, or you will collect polite passes that have nothing to do with your game.
Publishers are not investors
Now the mistake that eats more coaching hours than everything else combined. In a single year, at least eight of our 24 one-on-one sessions turned on the same confusion: a team built a publisher deck, full of gameplay detail, marketing plans and development milestones, and presented it to equity investors.
The pitch does not fail loudly. It fails quietly, because everything in it is true and none of it answers the investor's question. A publisher buys into one game and asks: will this title sell? An investor buys into your company and asks: will this team build something that grows? Spend your minutes on gameplay systems and you have answered a question nobody in the room asked.
A publisher is a business partner for one game. An investor is a co-owner of your company. Pitch one like the other and you lose both. The confusion runs deeper than most founders expect: in one past training cohort, roughly half of all applications ticked "publisher pitch" for an event built to connect studios with investors. If the equity-versus-project decision from chapter 2 is still open for you, close it before you read on.
Angels and VCs, in numbers
The word "investor" hides a big practical difference in how much of your company changes hands. A VC fund typically wants 15 to 25 percent. Angels usually stay under ten, scaled to the size of their check. In Europe, angel checks commonly land between 25k and 200k euros, with 25k the usual minimum and outliers reaching toward a million from so-called super angels. Angels also travel in groups: several writing around 50k each, sometimes pooled into one vehicle so your cap table stays clean.
Why does anyone write these checks at all? Portfolio math. An early-stage investor makes roughly ten bets, expects two to four to work out, and hopes one pays for the entire portfolio. That is the quiet standard your pitch is measured against. Not "is this a nice business" but "could this be the one". A solid small studio with a solid small plan is a perfectly good company and a poor venture bet, and that is not an insult. It is the reason project funding exists, as chapter 2 lays out.
"I'm going to do the math in my head as you talk. Other investors are doing the same."
The four investor archetypesFree with sign-in
The homework that wins meetings
Everything above condenses into one discipline: never walk into an investor meeting knowing less about them than they can learn about you in a single search. Check the portfolio for stage, genres and check sizes, and look for competitor investments. If they backed a rival, you want to find out at your desk, not mid-pitch. Read their recent interviews and posts, because investors tell the world what they want to hear. Then build a dossier with an AI assistant: feed it the investor's name, fund and portfolio, and ask what this person cares about and which hard questions they are likely to ask. Half the output will be noise. The other half is your preparation list.
Two to three hours of research before a moment-of-truth meeting is the cheapest advantage in fundraising. Most founders skip it, which is exactly why it works.
Before any investor meeting
- Scan the portfolio: stage, genres, check sizes. Does your ask even fit their range?
- Search for competitor investments and decide in advance how you will handle the answer.
- Read their last two or three interviews or posts. People tell you what they want to hear.
- Build an AI dossier on the investor and pull the five hardest questions from it.
- Guess the archetype and adjust your opening accordingly.
- Prepare two questions of your own. Investors judge founders by what they ask, too.
With the path from chapter 2 settled and the person across the table decoded, you are ready to compress everything into half a minute. That is chapter 9, worked examples included.