📡 This week at TFG
Pilots are taught a simple order of priorities for high-pressure situations: aviate, navigate, communicate.
First, fly the plane. Keep control. Do not get so distracted by alarms, weather, radio traffic, or fear that you forget the thing that keeps everyone alive. Then navigate. Know where you are, where you are going, and what options are still available. Then communicate. Tell the people who need to know what is happening, what you intend to do, and what you need from them.
That order matters. But it does not mean communication is unimportant. It means communication works best when the aircraft is under control and the path forward is clear.
Founders need a version of the same checklist.
When feedback gets sharp, aviate. Stay calm, stay in control, and keep building. When your pitch has to fit into five minutes, navigate. Know the route and make it legible. When power, ego, and conflict enter the room, communicate. Say what needs to be said clearly, without turning the conversation into a fight for control.
This issue is about all three.
If you are new here, welcome. If you have been around for a while, consider this your nudge to come back into the room. A lot is happening, and the best parts still live in the server.
Not in the Discord yet? Join the Community here.
đź’¬ Founder Feedback: Accepting Criticism
There was a lively discussion recently around deck feedback, especially around the value of brutally honest, unfiltered, and unvarnished critique.
As founders, we know the real world is not always gentle. Investors will not always soften the landing. Customers will not always explain why they churned. The market will not politely tell you your positioning is confusing, your pricing is wrong, or your deck is not working. Sometimes tough love is exactly what saves a startup from wasting six months on the wrong narrative, the wrong go-to-market motion, or the wrong assumption.
But there is a line.
There is a difference between rigorous critique and personal attack. “This deck has major flaws” is feedback. “Your market slide does not prove the market exists” is feedback. “Your legal structure may create problems for this type of raise” is feedback. Those comments may sting, but they are directed at the work.
The moment feedback becomes “Do you even understand your market?” or “How could you not know this?” it starts to lose its usefulness. The issue is not whether the person giving feedback is right. They might be. The issue is whether the feedback helps the founder see the truth clearly enough to act on it.
TFG is built around four pillars: education, mentorship, networking, and investment/funding opportunities. For those pillars to mean anything, the server has to function like an incubator. That means high standards. It means radical candor. It means founders should expect real critique and not just encouragement. But it also means we have to keep the room civilized.
The goal is not to make feedback softer. The goal is to make it cleaner.
Harsh feedback is part of the founder journey. So is learning how to receive it. When you hear something that hits a nerve, the first job is not to defend yourself. The first job is to find the truth inside the critique. What is the useful signal? What assumption is being challenged? What part of the deck, pitch, product, or business model needs to be made stronger?
This is where the 5C Framework comes back into play. Calm matters when the feedback feels personal. Capable matters when you realize you need to learn something you thought you already understood. Curious matters when you ask, “What am I missing?” instead of “Why are they attacking me?” Coachable matters when you actually make the change. Committed matters when you keep going after the room gets uncomfortable.
And for the people giving feedback, the same framework applies. Calm means you do not need to dominate the room to make a point. Capable means you can be precise instead of performative. Curious means you ask before assuming. Coachable means you can adjust your delivery when it is not landing. Committed means you care enough about the founder’s success to tell the truth without turning the conversation into a power play.
The bottom line: take the critique seriously, not personally. Be direct, but do not be disrespectful. Push the work hard. Leave the person intact.
As Chip Diller famously said in National Lampoon’s Animal House: “Thank you, sir! May I have another?”
Let’s keep making each other better, and let’s keep the disrespect out of the channel.
🎙️Pitch Readiness: New Pitch Assessment Requirement
Effective this week, TFG leadership is requiring all founders to attend a live Deck Assessment and Pitch Review before joining a Community Pitch session.
This is not meant to add friction for the sake of friction. It is meant to protect the quality of the room and give founders the best possible shot when they pitch.
A Community Pitch session should not be the first time a founder discovers that their deck is too dense, their pitch is too long, or their screen share does not work properly. Those are fixable problems, but they need to be fixed before the founder is in front of the room.
The goal is simple: your deck should be clear enough to follow quickly, your slides should use visuals instead of walls of text, and your pitch should be tight enough to land in under five minutes. We understand that this is difficult. Most founders can talk about their company for twenty minutes because they live inside the problem every day. The harder skill is knowing what to leave out.
A five-minute pitch forces discipline. It makes you choose the real story. It makes you clarify the problem, the customer, the product, the traction, the market, the ask, and why now. If a slide needs paragraphs of explanation, the slide is probably doing too much. If a pitch only works when you talk for twenty minutes, the narrative is probably not sharp enough yet.
We strongly encourage founders to study strong short-form examples and use them as a benchmark. Kevin Wu’s NicklPay pitch is a good example of a tight raise narrative, and Lee Smartt’s EIVES Technologies pitch is another strong reference point for founders actively raising.
Kevin Wu — NicklPay: https://youtu.be/232dd9LBOZc
Lee Smartt — EIVES Technologies: https://youtu.be/lAatM_ERArE
No signup is needed for the Deck and Pitch Assessment Boot Camp. Just join the session.
TFG Office Hours — Deck and Pitch Assessment Boot Camp
Fridays 11:00am – 12:00pm ET
Google Meet: https://meet.google.com/wdj-cutt-vdf
If you cannot attend, DM @adammeek3 in Discord to make other arrangements.
The point is not perfection. The point is readiness. A better deck creates a better pitch. A better pitch creates a better conversation. A better conversation gives the community, mentors, and potential investors something real to respond to.
🧠Founder’s Relationship with Power
This week’s Open Mic conversation went deep on a topic founders do not talk about enough: power.
Founders spend a lot of time thinking about product, fundraising, growth, hiring, and go-to-market. But the moment you start building a company, you are also building a power structure. Even if the team is small. Even if everyone is “equal.” Even if nobody is getting paid yet. Power is already in the room.
Power shows up in who makes the final call. It shows up in who controls the cap table. It shows up in who owns the relationship with the investor, customer, or technical system. It shows up when one co-founder feels unheard, when a team member feels micromanaged, or when a founder feels like no one else is carrying enough weight.
The important distinction from the session was that power is not automatically bad. Authority is necessary. Founders have to make decisions. Teams need direction. Investors need accountability. Customers need confidence. A company cannot run on endless consensus.
The danger comes when authority gets used to protect insecurity instead of serve the mission.
A founder who feels helpless may try to consolidate control. A founder who is scared of being wrong may stop making space for other people’s ideas. A founder who does not trust the world may hire people they can dominate instead of people who can challenge them. A founder who trusts too easily may hand over too much without boundaries and then feel betrayed when things break.
That is the tension. Too little trust creates conflict. Too much trust creates exposure. The work is finding enough trust to collaborate without abandoning responsibility.
This matters inside startups because early teams are fragile. A misunderstanding between two co-founders can become a fracture. A missed deliverable can become broken trust. A poorly worded message can become a fight that would have been solved in five minutes over voice. The smaller the company, the more every interaction matters.
It also matters in fundraising. Money is power, but not only for the investor. Founders may resent investors for asking for control, updates, milestones, or staged funding. Investors may feel helpless after wiring money and worry they have no way to protect the capital. When neither side names the power dynamic directly, both sides start filling in the blanks with assumptions.
The healthier approach is communication plus substance. It is not enough to say, “I value your input.” People need to feel that their input can actually shape the outcome. It is not enough to say, “I trust you.” Trust has to be backed by responsibility, follow-through, and repair when something breaks.
One of the strongest ideas from the discussion was that founders need to develop a third-person perspective in hard conversations. When someone gives feedback, challenges your authority, or says something that hits your ego, step back and ask: what is actually happening here? Is this about the business? Is this about tone? Is this about my own insecurity? Is there a useful signal inside a bad delivery?
That skill applies to feedback, leadership, co-founder conflict, investor conversations, and community conduct. The founder who can separate signal from ego has an advantage. The founder who cannot will keep losing useful information because it arrived in a form they did not like.
Power is not just about control. It is about responsibility. If you have authority in a company, a community, or even a conversation, the job is not to win every exchange. The job is to create an environment where the truth can be said, heard, and acted on.
That is the standard we should hold ourselves to in TFG, and it is the standard founders should carry into the companies they are building.
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