Amias Gerety, partner at QED Investors, has worked at the Virginia-based venture capital firm since 2017, focusing on fintech startups and early-stage growth. Before that, he was an acting assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, where he led the Office of Financial Institutions Policy. He currently sits on the board of directors of more than ten of QED's portfolio companies.

A crucial part of Gerety's work is understanding his portfolio companies' financial health, collaborating with founders to surface, monitor, and improve key performance indicators (KPIs).

For Gerety, strong founder-investor relationships let him provide valuable guidance so companies can avoid common financial pitfalls and grow across funding stages.

Read on to discover his insights into how you can keep investors invested in your startup.

CARTA: What’s a day in the life of an investor at QED?

AMIAS GERETY: For me, as an investing partner, my job is split between sourcing, analyzing, and managing the investments we make at QED. I’m on ten-plus boards. I also spend a lot of time on portfolio support.

Which metrics matter most when searching for disruptive companies?

The number one indicator at the early stage is revenue growth. At the Series A, we like to see a million-plus in revenue. If you tripled because you went from one to two customers, that’s not always interesting. But if you’ve tripled because you went from $300,000 to $1 million in revenue? OK, that’s interesting. If you tripled from $1 million to $3 million? Okay, now I'm clearing my schedule.

Beyond that, QED may be more focused on unit economics than some of our peers. Are you selling something people are willing to pay for? Or are you just lighting investor money on fire to get growth? It's easy to sell a dollar for 90 cents.

We’ve also become more disciplined about gross margin and gross profit. This has changed since the early 2020s. Not all revenue is 80% margin revenue, even at a tech company. For most payments, companies have 40% margins, not 80% margins.

Once you invest, what metrics should founders share with you?

In any business, there's always some nuanced set of KPIs that are semi-unique to that business. We want to understand those KPIs.

Post-investment, we’re looking for reasons to believe the company is building enduring value, because, ultimately, fast revenue growth from $1 million to $2 million does not guarantee fast revenue growth from $100 million to $200 million.

We try to be very flexible and thoughtful. For example, if you’re building a network effect, a KPI might be the number of participants in the network rather than the revenue from each one. If you’re building an enterprise motion, it might be about expansion revenue opportunity versus new sales revenue. At its core, though, results are driven by growth.

>> Learn more: Startup metrics and KPIs that founders should know

What is an ideal cadence for founders to provide investor updates?

Communication is important enough that it's not always formalized—but on average, it's between once or twice a month. We also use Slack and WhatsApp for real-time communication, because there's always something happening.

Most of our companies do semi-formal monthly reporting with some kind of financial KPI or other investor update. Then, we have board meetings and do all of our formal reporting to our limited partners on a quarterly cadence. We run formal reporting through Carta.

Why should founders share direct access to a company’s cap table?

People don’t always share direct access, but as an investor, I use Carta to check my own thinking. It’s easy for anyone to lose track of the mental math. If you go two years between funding rounds, you might not know the answers to all your questions.

A recent example: One of my companies is negotiating a term sheet. I know how much we own of the company, but when I looked at the cap table, I realized that, fully diluted, it's worth a little less than I thought, because we've issued more options. That's helpful to know.

How important is it for founders to understand their cap table?

It can surprise some founders how the waterfall in their own cap table works. We recommend that founders understand it at a range of exit valuations. Carta makes it easy for us to play around and show people how to get a feel for things, which has been really valuable.

We find at QED that many founders lose track of what their actual dilution is. They might do a series of SAFE notes and lose track of the dilution or the impact of the preference.

Sometimes, we have good news for founders. I've had scenarios where I say, "Look at your cap table. Look at your preference stack. You may be worth less than your last valuation, but you're probably worth more than your preference stack—and that means every incremental dollar of value you can create goes to you and your team."

But sometimes, it’s bad news. We have to say, "Hey, you're selling for $50 million and you're going to make about $2 million to $3 million.” That can be really bracing. Some people assume if they build a $50 million company, they’ll end up with more.

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That could be shocking. Can founders avoid those surprises?

One suggestion is to work backwards from the expectations of the next round, recognizing that different rounds require different financial metrics. Some founders miss the fact that they need to become a different kind of company as they grow.

From Series A to Series B, you need to do more than move revenue from $1 million to $10 million. You actually have to build a company capable of generating that revenue, because a Series B investor wants to see evidence of repeatability and strong business foundations, not just happy customers.

Learn about medium-outcome companies, too, not just superstars. It’s easy to say, "Well, I've got X amount of revenue, and I heard Company Y raised at 100X revenue; therefore, I should raise at 100X revenue."

But in the public markets? Basically nobody trades at 100X revenue. The outliers gather so much attention that people think the outliers are the market. The reality is most companies are not outliers. That's the whole definition of an outlier—they’re rare.

How can investors help a company stay on track?

Some of it is just the basics of knowing your numbers, but you have to share those numbers with your investors and your board. Investors can spot gaps for you and help you course-correct where needed.

For example, when someone asks how much money you made last month, the answer is straightforward. You can look at your bank account and get a number.

But we’ve learned in tech to focus on things like annual recurring revenue (ARR) and many founders and investors focus on committed ARR or booked ARR or scaled ARR. Those can help you understand the potential or momentum of a business in a more insightful way. But they also can hide weakness. If there’s a big gap between booked and realized ARR or between ARR and cash, we might make closing that gap a strategic priority.

One of my companies has a six- to nine-month ramp-up cycle. When they're growing fast, they could have a 20% or 25% gap between realized revenue and contracted revenue. In that case, the gap is just a sign of fast growth.

But if that gap grows, it might be a sign your ramp process isn't actually working. If that gap doesn't ever convert, it might be a sign your sales process overpromises and under-delivers.

Does that tie into any other pitfalls? What common mistakes do founders make?

There can be meaningful gaps in how a company thinks of itself and how it actually reports its financials. If you have a well-funded company, you’re often focused on KPIs that indicate revenue. For example, you can have scenarios where you legally have ARR, because a customer signed a contract and you’ve delivered on the contract, but it didn’t convert to cash because you’re still small and your billing doesn’t work yet.

Gaps like that can be a bit of a surprise, because I’ll have a deck from a board of directors, and they’ll enter information in Carta, and the narrative doesn’t match the numbers. It forces everyone into a moment of truth.

One of the things that helps is going back to Carta’s reporting. It helps us and our portfolio companies to be disciplined about what’s really happening. We can look across a wide variety of business models, and it puts things in very simple black and white statements. It doesn’t change prior outcomes, but once everyone is aware of the gap, we work through it.

Great perspective. One last question—any near-future predictions?

I think it will be much harder to create durable value in AI-driven business models than the current valuation suggests. Instead, I think we’ll find second-gen and third-gen AI companies disrupt and compete with first-gen AI companies.

You can already see this with DeepSeek and many others. Open AI is amazing, but I'm also amazed at how quickly other companies have come in to compete. I think that same concept will play out through the value chain.

It’s one of the reasons I remain super excited about AI. The distance between product idea and product actually getting shipped is collapsing faster than people think.

Gerety’s roadmap for company-building: An investor's perspective

Companies hit certain markers as they move through their fundraising journeys, and close communication with investors is a key element of success. “One thing I really emphasize with my companies—particularly between Series A and Series B—is that you should have a company-building roadmap," he said. "It’s just as important as your revenue pipeline and your product roadmap.”

Below are some of the ways Amias Gerety thinks about each stage of early-stage fundraising.

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