Brandes brings a refreshingly candid perspective on what early-stage investors actually care about, and it might surprise you. When she opens a pitch deck, she scrolls straight to the team slide and almost nothing else. Not the market size, not the financials, not the roadmap. Just the team. For a fund like Also Capital that writes concentrated inception-stage checks, they are making a bet on a person before there is much else to bet on, and Brandes is clear that this is not just a cliche. She wants to be able to guess roughly what a company does just by reading the backgrounds on that slide.

On the fundraising process itself, Brandes drops one of the more honest reframes you will hear: you are never done fundraising. The mindset of "close this round so I can get back to building" is, in her view, a misunderstanding of how early-stage venture works entirely. Fundraising is a game of momentum, and if you stop, you start from scratch. The CEO's job, at its core, is to sell the vision, iterate, and sell it again. If that sounds exhausting to you, she says, it might be worth asking whether the founder path is the right one.

She also offers practical advice that does not get talked about enough: founders should be doing reference checks on investors too, not just the other way around. Talk to portfolio founders. Ask VCs how they pitch themselves to their own LPs. Find out who their LPs are. The investor-founder relationship is a 10-year commitment at minimum, and Brandes argues you owe it to yourself to vet that relationship just as rigorously as they are vetting you. That reciprocity, she says, is actually a green flag for funds like Also.