The following is from a Radical Ventures AI Founders Masterclass session with Ribbon CEO and Co-Founder, Arsham Ghahramani.
For most technical founders, venture capital is a black box. The mechanics of fundraising, the psychology of investor decision-making, and the art of building relationships that endure beyond a single round are rarely discussed with the candor they deserve. Yet understanding how VCs think, what drives their conviction, and how to engage them strategically can be the difference between struggling to close a round and building partnerships that compound over years.
Few founders have navigated this terrain as deliberately as Arsham Ghahramani. From a PhD in AI working on cancer research using early GANs applied to genomic data, to scaling recommendation systems at Amazon, to now leading Ribbon, an AI hiring platform that has conducted over 1 million interviews and raised $8M+, Arsham has learned to translate technical excellence into investor conviction.
In his Masterclass conversation with Radical Partner Sanjana Basu, Ghahramani pulled back the curtain on what actually works when engaging VCs, sharing hard-earned lessons on relationship-building, crafting the perfect pitch, and the often uncomfortable truth that founders are always competing for attention in an oversaturated market.
Understanding the VC Model: Alignment and Incentives
Ghahramani’s first lesson is foundational: you can’t engage investors effectively if you don’t understand what they’re optimizing for. VCs manage capital on behalf of limited partners: pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and institutional asset managers, who expect differentiated returns. A $500 million fund isn’t successful if it returns $600 million. It’s successful if it returns several multiples of that capital.
“When I first started, I didn’t even know what an LP was,” Ghahramani admits. But once he grasped the model, the find, decide, invest, build, exit cycle that defines VC, he could reverse-engineer the engagement strategy. Investors aren’t just evaluating your product. They’re evaluating whether you can build a generational company, whether you can sell at scale, and whether you have the slope to grow into the role of CEO even if you’ve never done it before.
Ghahramani emphasizes that founders need to understand the specifics: what stage does a given fund invest at? What is their thesis? Radical Partner, Sanjana Basu notes that her inbox is flooded with pitches from founders building businesses completely outside Radical’s investment thesis. “It’s extremely critical to understand the thesis,” she agrees. “If you’re reaching out to an AI-focused fund, you should be building an AI business.”
Building Relationships Before You Need Them
One of Ghahramani’s most valuable insights is deceptively simple: start building relationships with investors long before you need to raise. The best investment decisions, Basu notes, are made over a period of time, not at a point in time. When an investor has watched a founder execute over six months or a year, conviction builds organically. Metrics improve. The founder’s communication sharpens. Trust accumulates.
Ghahramani treated fundraising as an ongoing relationship-building exercise. He reached out to investors not to pitch, but to share progress and ask for advice. “If you ask for investment, you get advice,” he reflects. “If you ask for advice, you get investment.”
This approach also protects founders from the “meat grinder” dynamic Basu describes, where investors are pressured into making decisions within impossibly tight timelines. “I have people come to me saying they have a term sheet and I have 12 hours to decide,” she explains. “We have a fiduciary responsibility. We’re not just going to throw money anywhere.” Building relationships early gives founders leverage, credibility, and optionality when it’s time to close.
Warm Intros as a Proxy for Sales Ability
Ghahramani reframes one of the most common pieces of fundraising advice: the importance of warm introductions. Yes, warm intros help you cut through noise. But more importantly, they’re a test.
“If you can’t get an intro into a VC firm,” Ghahramani explains, “how will you sell into Tesla or Disney?” Investors view a founder’s ability to navigate networks, build credibility, and secure introductions as a proxy for their ability to sell at scale. The skill set is fundamentally the same: identifying the right person, finding a credible path to them, earning their attention, and delivering enough value that they want to engage further.
For Ghahramani, who didn’t have a deep network in North America when he started Ribbon, this was a skill he had to develop incrementally. “Treat it as a 1% everyday thing,” he advises. “Just like any network effect, it compounds over time.”
The Two-Seconds-Per-Slide Reality
When it comes to pitch decks, Ghahramani’s advice is blunt: investors spend an average of 30 seconds on your entire deck. At 15 slides, that’s two seconds per slide. He tracked engagement using DocSend and was stunned. “The average across all investors is a maximum of 30 seconds for the entire deck.”
The lesson: every slide must earn its place. Decks should never exceed 15 slides. Investors are more interested in hearing your story than reading dense slides. And a great demo is worth more than 10 slides of explanation. Ribbon’s voice AI product is visceral. When investors hear it interview candidates with natural emotion and hyper-personalized questions, skepticism evaporates. “If you have a great demo, use it,” Ghahramani emphasizes. “Live demos that actually work cut through faster than any pitch deck.”
Framing Your Team with Confidence
One of the most underrated aspects of fundraising is how founders frame their own experience. Technical founders, in particular, tend to undersell. Ghahramani’s advice: “Frame your experience as the most egotistical version you can imagine. Don’t lie, but put forward the best version of your truth.”
If you led a recommendation engine at Amazon, don’t say you “worked on a small piece of the system.” Say you led the team that generated billions in incremental revenue by predicting what millions of customers would buy next. In a market where every founder is competing for attention, humility can be misread as lack of conviction.
Basu reinforces this from the investor side. For foundational technology, investors want the top five to ten people on earth, people like Aidan Gomez, who co-authored the Transformers paper. For applied AI, technical chops still matter enormously, but investors also evaluate slope, the trajectory of a founder’s growth. They look for self-awareness: do you know what you don’t know? Will you hire people better than you? Can you sell relentlessly?
Navigating the Fundraising Process
When it’s time to raise, Ghahramani approaches it in phases. First, preparation: refine the deck with trusted advisors and practice the pitch with lower-priority investors. Then, execution: compress the process into a tight window and pitch as many aligned investors as possible in rapid succession.
He emphasizes being reactive to feedback. If multiple investors raise the same concern, address it immediately. And be grateful for fast nos. “The worst thing is when someone strings you along,” Ghahramani notes. “A fast no saves you time.”
Investors signal interest through the depth of their questions. High-level questions suggest lukewarm engagement. But when an investor digs into how customers use the product or asks about unit economics, that’s a sign they’re “leaning in.”
And perhaps most importantly, founders need to embrace rejection. Most investors will say no. The goal isn’t universal acceptance. It’s finding one investor who is deeply thesis-aligned, who believes in the vision, and who will champion you internally.
A Blueprint for Technical Founders
Ghahramani’s insights offer a blueprint for technical founders navigating the opacity of venture capital. Fundraising, like building a company, is a skill that can be learned, refined, and executed with intention. It requires understanding investor incentives. Building relationships before you need them. Framing your story with confidence. Moving fast when it’s time to close. And above all, treating fundraising not as a necessary evil, but as an opportunity to find partners who will bet their careers on your success.
Because at the end of the day, that’s what great venture relationships are: mutual bets on the future, grounded in trust, aligned on vision, and built to endure far beyond the first check.
This post is based on insights from Radical Talks, a podcast from Radical Ventures exploring innovation at the forefront of AI. For more conversations with AI builders, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.