What do investors REALLY want to invest in today?

Do you have a Venture Capital-style “VC” investment pitch? Trash it.

The VC-ecosystem is in DEFCON 1 meltdown…

… which won’t make a dollar of difference to you, because chasing Venture money has always been a colossal waste of time.

In the meantime, only good things are happening here at the West Coast Finance HQ.

In fact, yesterday afternoon – roughly 5 hours after I announced I’m running for president of West Coast Finance – I spoke to the owner of a $100m company who had taken VC money about seven years ago (let’s call him Joe).

This founder had nothing good to say about his investors.

(“F&^% those guys, they couldn’t operate a popcorn machine”)

Everything went wrong with the company immediately after their money came in.

Think about that for a minute … Venture Capital is supposed to fix problems, not cause them:

But the new management didn’t “get” the customer, and revenues were stalled out and starting to move backward.

That’s when I explained to Joe about West Coast Finance – and our vision for building successful COMPANIES, not pumping and dumping garbage stocks and crypto coins – here’s what he said to me.

“I’m with you. I mean, f**k these VCs. They’ve done nothing but create problems for my brand. It was already on track to be 5x bigger than it is today and generating a LOT more free cash flow for me and my family. I know these VC want out and I want them out.

How about you step in and take things over?”

Normally this kind of conversation takes 6 months.

But here I was, in just 3 days, writing up a $100m deal.

What did Joe see in my vision that was better than VC, PE … including Apollo, Blackrock and TPG? It wasn’t my magic pitch deck or a sexy valuation with the promise of life-changing financial returns. It wasn’t even that Oren Klaff silver-tongued devil magic at work.

It was so simple:

The deal came about because of my story YESTERDAY about my son’s hockey team winning their championship game. Joe was emotionally triggered by 3-words in it:

Dedication. Honesty. Hard work.

Simple, but this is how you take a kid's hockey team to the championships, AND how you take over a $100m company …

… and that was that.

West Coast Finance is all about relationships and doing the right thing even if it costs you some money in the short term.

This is the money choice you need to be thinking about:

1. Do I want to roll the dice with some VC brats who will gladly prison-shank me in the back, like they did SVB, just to juice-up their IRR numbers this quarter?
2. Or, do I want to go with an ecosystem of company builders like West Coast Finance who want to roll up their sleeves, work hard, and launch the next great American company?

Because Joe learned the hard way that having the right capital partners is key (and that often means avoiding VC/PE until WAY LATER when you are actually in control of your own company)...

VC doesn’t work for Me, because what’s the point of having “partners” who …

….. Create ultra-sexy valuations

……… Get big-time media mentions

……..…. and deliver huge check sizes

… but are buidling something that just collapses in the end, and there’s no shareholder value for all your years of work.

Today, let’s talk about what REAL investors – as in adults with spreadsheets, not 24-year-old cypto-bros from Stanford – REALLY want to see before writing a check. It’s all in the next section …

-Oren

What do investors REALLY want to invest in? Regular companies with reasonable growth plans!

Thanks to the recent banking crisis, I’ve spent most of the past week in back-to-back meetings with the who’s who of West Coast Finance.

I’m talking about the regional banks, law firms, and institutional investors that act as the financial backbone for basically everyone outside San Francisco.

Want to know what they’re all asking me about?

Where do we find fundable companies that can pass our compliance standards?

Because despite whatever fears they have about the market, they’re in the money business.

That means no matter what the markets are doing, they have to put money to work in search of returns.

But thanks to a decade of near-zero interest rates and shrinking options in the public markets, trillions of dollars flooded into the private markets.

Want to know what happens when all the money in the world starts chasing after the same finite amount of high-growth startups that have the potential for career-defining returns?

Companies that never should have received funding in the first place were getting huge checks at crazy valuations with little to no due diligence.

And for all the investors who didn’t pull out the money gun and dump it into anything that moved…

They had to deal with questions from investors like “why aren’t you investing in (insert any overhyped VC/PE/Wall Street narrative here)?”

But what goes up must come down. And in 2022, it came down hard and fast.

The S&P 500 finished 19% lower in 2022 while the Nasdaq dropped 33%. Just five stocks—Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon—together lost almost $3.7 trillion in market value over the course of the year.

And firms like Tiger Global ate a massive shit sandwich on the way down.

How is that possible? Because for the entire Era of Easy Money, private equity investors relied on multiple expansions – not margin expansion – to drive returns.

Who needs revenue today when you can raise capital at 20x of your forecasted revenue… in 2026!

That game is OVER!

Higher interest rates mean the cost of capital has gone up. It also means the entire capital markets ecosystem has returned to how finance used to work – valuing companies based on earnings growth.

And if you want to drive earnings growth in this changing macro environment, you’re going to need a new playbook.

That’s exactly why I launched this newsletter, the Pitch Anything Playbook.

And it’s exactly why I took a page out of the original “West Coast Finance” blueprint that started the venture ecosystem as we know it…

Getting everyone who wants to do deals together in a room… agreeing to a certain set of standardized formats… and aggressively teaching capital raising CEOs how to structure their pitch to get funded F.A.S.T.