Average Minds
Right, It seems like every time I scroll through LinkedIn, I stumble across another post declaring the "essential" metrics for Series A and B funding rounds. You know the ones—ARR targets, growth rates, retention figures, burn multiples—all presented in neat little boxes, as if building a great business can be boiled down to ticking off a checklist. And honestly? I can’t help but wonder: have we lost the plot a bit?
Don’t get me wrong, metrics matter. They’re incredibly useful for benchmarking and decision-making, but somewhere along the way, we’ve started treating them as gospel rather than guidance. It’s like judging a book by its cover—or worse, by how thick it is—while completely ignoring the story inside bro.
Take ARR, for example. It’s not that hard to make this number look good in the short term. Offer steep discounts, stretch out payment terms, or chase one-off deals and call it “revenue.” Sure, it might look great on a pitch deck, but it’s like building a house on sand. That shaky foundation will catch up with you eventually.
What’s even more troubling is how these benchmarks can distort decision-making. I once spoke to a founder who admitted to booking one-time deals as ARR. When I asked why, they shrugged and said they felt they had to—because that’s what investors expect. The pressure to fit into these arbitrary molds is real, and it’s driving founders to prioritise short-term optics over long-term sustainability.
This hits home, because I am currently operating in emerging markets. These benchmarks weren’t built with them in mind. I’ve met incredible founders all across Africa who may not hit all these conventional targets but are solving critical problems with tremendous potential. Are we really saying their ideas don’t matter because they don’t fit into a Silicon Valley spreadsheet? *Realising in real-time that this means more opportunities for me.
Here’s what I find especially striking: when you listen to truly great entrepreneurs—the Bezoses, the Musks—they rarely harp on about these kinds of metrics. Instead, they talk about customer obsession, product excellence, building for the long term and other game-changing shit. They focus on creating something meaningful, something valuable. And yet here we are, obsessed with numbers that often say more about optics than outcomes.
If Eleanor Roosevelt was in the Start-Up ecosystem she would instead have said:
“Visionary minds discuss how to transform industries and serve customers in revolutionary ways. Conventional minds discuss quarterly metrics and funding rounds. Short-sighted minds obsess over benchmarks and vanity numbers."
As an angel investor, I’ve noticed we can sometimes get swept up in metrics that make perfect sense for Series A and B but can be downright misleading at our stage. Let’s talk about the ones that deserve a closer look when evaluating early-stage ventures.
First up: Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC). Founders love to flaunt low CAC numbers in their early days, and who wouldn’t? But the real story is how these costs evolve as the business scales. I’ve seen startups with stellar early metrics fall apart when they try to expand beyond their first network of customers. The real question isn’t just, “What’s your CAC?” It’s, “How defensible is your customer acquisition strategy as you grow?”
Then there’s team building. It’s tempting to bulk up the leadership team with flashy hires from Google or Meta—it looks great in a pitch deck. But at this stage, I’m far more interested in whether the team is aligned with the actual needs of the business. Too often, I’ve seen startups burn through cash on premature C-suite hires when what they really needed was another engineer or a salesperson to push the needle.
TAM (Total Addressable Market). Honestly, I’m tired of hearing about multibillion-dollar markets with no clear path to get there. What’s far more compelling is your Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM)—and a laser-focused plan to dominate a specific niche. Show me how you’ll own your corner of the market before daydreaming about global domination.
Next, user engagement metrics. Numbers like Daily Active Users (DAUs) and Monthly Active Users (MAUs) are often paraded as proof of traction, but they can be wildly deceptive without proper context. What matters more is the depth of engagement. Are users actually finding value in your product, or are they just checking it out once before vanishing? That’s the real question.
Growth rates are another slippery slope at the angel stage. Sure, going from one customer to two is technically 100% growth, but let’s not get carried away by percentages just yet. What I care about is the story behind the numbers. Why did that second customer sign up? How different was their journey compared to the first? These are the insights that matter.
And, of course, there’s Product-Market Fit (PMF). The holy grail every founder loves to claim they’ve achieved. I wrote about it here.
Don’t let these benchmarks blind you. Yes, they’re helpful tools, but they’re just that—tools. They’re not the whole story. By fixating on them, you risk overlooking exceptional founders and game-changing ideas that don’t fit the mould (Insert: Amazon).
And to founders, I’d say this: don’t let these numbers define you. Focus on building something meaningful. Solve real problems in innovative ways. The metrics will follow when you get the fundamentals right. And if they don’t? Well, maybe you’re creating something so revolutionary that it needs an entirely new set of metrics.
At the end of the day, building a truly great business isn’t about ticking boxes on a spreadsheet. It’s about context. It’s about vision. It’s about crafting something remarkable that makes those standard benchmarks seem outdated.
So let’s stop obsessing over the metrics as if they’re the destination. They’re not. They’re signposts on a much bigger journey. And the most exciting journeys? They’re often the ones that go off the beaten path entirely.