652 - If Investors Can't Find You, They Can't Trust You
Jens Heitland reflects on why investors quietly verify the people behind a company before they ever trust the numbers.
Drawn from a pretest ahead of a funding round, this episode explores how a gap between internal expertise and external visibility can quietly threaten a raise, and what changes when thought leadership is built backward to close it.
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Why We Built Our Thought Leadership Strategy Backward From a Funding Round
When a company prepares to raise capital, most of the visible work happens in the numbers, sharpening revenue models and stress testing projections until the legal structures behind them hold up under scrutiny. That is the part everyone anticipates and spends months preparing for.
What gets less attention is the second layer of due diligence, the one that looks at people rather than spreadsheets. Investors do not only ask whether the business case holds. They ask whether the people standing behind it are truly operating at the level the investment depends on, and whether that can be confirmed from the outside, without a single internal conversation.
In one pretest we ran ahead of a funding round, this question exposed a gap. The team members who were meant to represent the company, the ones whose credibility the raise partly rested on, had real expertise inside the business, but almost none of it was visible from outside its walls. An investor searching for proof of their standing would have come up short, unable to find the confirmation their own diligence process required.
That gap changes how a raise is perceived before a single meeting takes place. Due diligence increasingly begins online, quietly, before any data room is opened. If the people representing a company cannot be found or verified in an early search, doubt creeps in before trust can form, and the strongest financial model in the world still sits next to a question mark about the humans responsible for executing it.
The response was to reverse the usual order of operations. Instead of treating thought leadership as a separate marketing initiative running alongside the fundraising strategy, we focused on the strategic pipeline first and asked which team members needed to be externally credible for this specific raise, and in which field of expertise that credibility needed to be demonstrated. From there, a thought leadership approach was built backward from that requirement, aligning each person's visible presence with the exact competence an investor would be trying to verify.
That reversal changes what thought leadership is for. It stops being a general brand exercise and becomes part of the due diligence infrastructure itself. When the right expert is visible in the right field, an investor doing background research finds confirmation rather than a void, and the trust that would otherwise need to be built during the meeting is already partially established before it starts.
There is a broader pattern underneath this specific case. Organizations often separate their communication strategy from their operational strategy, treating one as support material for the other rather than as a structural part of the same system. But when the goal is significant enough, raising capital, closing a partnership, entering a new market, that separation becomes a liability. The people who need to be trusted have to be visible in a way that matches the trust being asked for.
What this pretest made clear went beyond marketing into how the whole system was structured. Sometimes the most useful move is to step back from the immediate task and look at the totality of what is required, then work out which people, which experts, and which visible proof points actually connect to that outcome. The capital raise did not need louder marketing. It needed the right people to already be seen as who they were.
This holds true well beyond fundraising. Any process where trust is assessed from the outside, a partnership, a board appointment, a key hire, runs on the same quiet mechanism. Visibility either confirms what is true internally or leaves a gap for doubt to fill.
Highlights:
00:00 Align Raise and Leadership
00:13 Investor Due Diligence Basics
00:32 Team Credibility Gap
01:08 Activating Team Thought Leaders
01:29 Step Back and Integrate
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Transcript :
So when we looked into, okay, they're going to raise capital, how do we support the raise capital strategy with thought leadership strategy that is enhancing each other? So the thing was that if you look at basic like raising funds and asking for investments, in the end, what the other side is doing, they do a due diligence. They do a due diligence on the business. They go into the numbers. All of that's obvious. But they always do as well a due diligence on the team members. And what was clear at that time when we did like a pretest around this, that the team members that should be representing the company were not on the level externally verifiable as they are in true life. So let's say if an external person looking into the company and then trying to verify, is this person truly on the level that we need for the investment to pay back, they were not be able, or at least we in our test scenario, were not be able to understand that this person is on the right level. So what we did was we looked into the strategic pipeline, we looked into the thought leadership strategy, and then flipped that around and say, "Okay, how can we drive thought leadership from the different team members in the field that they work in, and how can that then help to be like well seen in the due diligence," and then things happen. So I think sometimes we just need to step back and look at the totality on how do we do things with the right people and with the right experts that help us to get to our goal, and that was what we did.