Hi all,
Another Tuesday, another conversation about places.
And the funny thing is, when you start talking about places, you always end up in the same place. Real estate. Then money. Then the bank.
I’ve seen this scene more times than I can count.
A founder walks into a bank with a project they deeply believe in. A place with soul. A strong vision. Something different. Something that could actually matter.
They explain it with passion:
We’re building a hybrid hospitality space with a strong community layer, curated programming, and a unique positioning…
And somewhere around that sentence, the banker politely disconnects.
Not visibly. Not aggressively. Just enough.
You can feel it in the room.
The founder thinks: they don’t get it.
The banker thinks: this is risky.
Both are right. And that’s the problem I wanted to share with you today.
Because most founders don’t fail to get financed because their project is bad, we failed because we were speaking the wrong language to the wrong audience.
Pitching vision to someone who’s trained to evaluate risk.
And vision, when it’s not translated properly, sounds like uncertainty.
I’ve learned this the hard way.
Not by reading a book about financing, but by sitting in rooms where I realized something simple:
👉 the goal is not to make the bank excited.
👉 the goal is to make the bank feel safe.
In the paid version, I’ll break down how I think about it now, how to present a project without killing the vision, but without scaring the person who has to say yes, using all the NOs I received to better understand how I then got a YES ahah (and still got some NOs sometimes…)
