A seed-stage start-up is a lot like an NFL team early in the season: full of potential, storylines, and optimism but still mostly unproven. As in football, the truth beneath the excitement is far more sobering. A typical NFL broadcast runs three hours and 12 minutes, yet only about 11 minutes feature the ball in play. Everything else is the slow, grinding work of getting aligned at the line of scrimmage.
If the start-up journey were televised, a seed-to-Series A season would look the same: a highlight reel totaling short “moments,” a successful pilot, a key hire, a metric bending in the right direction wrapped in months of repetition, reframing, customer calls, dead-ends, and uncomfortable learning. The “action” is real, but fleeting. The work between “snaps” is what determines whether a team moves the “chains.”
Where capital actually changes outcomes
In football, even under a salary cap, the advantage of selective investment is measurable. Research analyzing salary-cap allocation across NFL teams shows that higher spending on critical positions, such as quarterbacks, wide receivers, and offensive linemen, is strongly linked to improved team performance.
Broad cross-sport analyses find that higher payroll spending correlates with increased regular-season win percentage, even if the effect is somewhat muted in the NFL, relative to other leagues.
College football (where budgets vary wildly) makes the relationship starker. Financial analyses of Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) programs show that bigger football budgets correspond to stronger on-field performance, with investment driving everything from recruiting to facilities to coaching depth.
The seed-to-Series A moment is the start-up equivalent. The first check buys the chance to get on the field. But the subsequent financing round is where capital starts shaping the outcome: senior engineering talent becomes affordable, go-to-market experiments can run in parallel, and infrastructure finally scales beyond duct tape. Money doesn’t guarantee wins, but it expands the playbook.
Speed Is overrated. Discipline isn’t.
Founders often believe that what gets them to a subsequent financing round is speed. But football and research tell us it’s discipline. Sports science is unequivocal: Deliberate practice, the structured, effortful improvement of targeted weaknesses, is one of the strongest drivers of rising performance. A large meta-analysis confirms deliberate practice accounts for a meaningful share of performance differences across sports, even if less so among the already elite, where everyone works hard.
Psychology goes further. “Grit” (the ability to sustain effort toward long-term goals) predicts success across domains, independent of talent or intelligence. In other words: doing the unglamorous work – repeatedly – moves the ball.
This is the real foundation to be built following a seed financing round.
A seed round is often raised on inspiration and instinct but allows the founder an opportunity to begin cementing a strong foundation: Weekly metrics that don’t vanish upon contact with reality; customer love that’s deeper than enthusiasm; and a team that can line up and execute the same play 10 different ways depending on how the defense shifts.
In order to be successful in raising a subsequent financing round (typically a Series A pitch), the focus should be on proving repeatability. It is easy to sell ambition, but investors aren’t looking for more highlights; they’re looking for sustained drives. The question to answer is: Have you built the capacity to produce real action, again and again, regardless of the obstacles in front of you?
Statistically, most start-ups never do. But those that are successful resemble great football teams with focused investments in the positions that matter, disciplined iteration between plays, and a team capable of turning brief moments of execution into a full season of progress.
The seed round buys the uniform and gets you on the field.
Now prove you can play the game.
The author is a partner at Ibex Investors, a USD 1B Investments firm based in Colorado