The seed bar changes by sector

The bar at seed doesn't hold constant across categories. What has to be true for an AI company looks nothing like what has to be true for a fintech company, and treating every pitch against the same checklist is how good sectoral judgment turns into generic advice. Different categories fail for different reasons, so the one thing that has to be true before anything else, differs too.

This isn't a checklist. It's the one question I actually ask myself for each category, before anything else about the pitch matters.

AI. Is this AI actually doing the job end to end, live, with a real data or distribution moat forming from doing it, not a wrapper on someone else's model? Most AI pitches sound like this is already true. Very few of them actually are, once you ask what breaks the moment the underlying model changes.

Fintech. Is there a real, live financial relationship already proving itself, a loan repaid, a policy attached, a transaction cleared, or is this still a plan waiting on distribution? Distribution is the whole game in a regulated market, and a deck can describe a partnership that hasn't actually been signed just as easily as one that has.

Consumer. Would people pay for this and come back on their own, without a subsidy or a discount holding them there? Retention that survives without one is rare enough that its absence is usually the real story, however good the growth chart looks on its own.

Commerce. Does this make money on a real transaction without subsidizing it, and would it survive losing its first anchor customer or platform? Commerce businesses tend to look durable long before they actually are, and the one relationship that made the first year work is exactly what a bad quarter takes away first.

Different categories, different questions, and none of them are answered by a good story about the market. The pitch that can't answer its own question honestly is the one I pass on, whatever else is in the deck.