Gust

Hey everyone. I'm Keyvan Firouzi of Gust and Preferred Return. I’ve spent the past five years doing 409A valuations for over a thousand venture-backed startups. I’ve seen a lot of pitch decks, worked with a lot of founders, and have seen what kind of startups earn funding. Financing is a huge step in a startup’s life. But receiving contextualized advice from angel investors and VCs on a new venture is almost as valuable as the funding itself. Unfortunately, it’s unrealistic for investors to give feedback to every company. So I’ve added my derivative modeling background from a previous life to our data about startup investments to build the startup evaluation & feedback engine, which helps bring contextualized feedback to founders. We assess information the same way investors would (team history, business model, progress, etc.) to produce the sort of feedback about where you should be looking for capital and how you can improve your venture in the eyes of investors. This tool won’t replace investors (every successful startup is unique in its own way), but we hope that it will give founders some much needed, contextualized, and tangible next steps to take their venture to the next level. Like anyone else in startupland, we’re always trying to improve—so please feel free to share any feedback you have, and we’ll try to answer any questions as well!