This week, I returned to the Bread and Jam Summer Festival as a judge.

A room full of pitching founders, each with a matter of minutes to make their case, and a panel deciding who had actually done the work versus who had rehearsed the performance of doing it. It is a useful place to stand if you want to see, in real time, what separates a founder who lands an investor from one who does not.

The pattern was consistent. The founders who struggled were not short on ambition or effort. They were answering a question nobody in the room was asking. A founder pitching Series A economics to a Pre-Seed audience, or vice versa, sounds sharp and lands flat. The room does not reward the answer. It rewards the answer to the right question.

That is the first key, and most founders miss it entirely. Pre-Seed, Seed and Series A investors are not asking a harder version of the same question. They are asking different questions. At Pre-Seed the question is whether you understand the problem and can pull this off. It’s mostly about you. At Seed, it is whether what is working can work at scale. At Series A it is whether a good business can become a materially bigger one without breaking.

Get the phase wrong and everything else you say, however well-prepared, is aimed at the wrong target.

The second key is simpler, and it holds across all three phases. Whatever the room, investors are assessing the same four things: Customer, Universe, Team, and Economics. I call it the CUTE model. Know your ideal customer with precision, not a demographic bracket. Show a market that is big enough to matter and a bottom-up build that gets you there. Name your team's gaps honestly rather than pretending you have none. And know your unit economics and breakeven point cold, because hesitation on that single question undoes an hour of good work.

The founders who won the room at Bread & Jam had not memorised more slides. They had simply worked out which room they were standing in, then prepared the substance behind it.

The founders I learn most from are not the ones who have already exited. They are the ones currently in the hardest part of their build.

Episode two of In The Weeds is with Jed, founder of JUCED. We got into the origins of the brand, and then into the part most founders don't talk about publicly: the actual challenges of scaling. Where the pressure is showing up, what he's had to rethink, and where I think the leverage is.

Building and Exiting: New Covent Garden Soup Company and Little Dish, from first day to final sale. What held, what nearly didn't.