Investor Advice with Tomas Fanta

In this interview, Tomas, an early-stage investor at Heartcore Capital, shares what he looks for when evaluating startups and the common mistakes founders make when raising capital. He discusses the importance of strong founding teams, clear market insights, and tangible traction over polished pitch decks, while emphasizing ambitious thinking, global vision, and the ability to execute. Tomas also explains why learning quickly, building cohesive teams, and actively listening to investor feedback are some of the strongest signals of a successful founder.

Tell us more about yourself

Tomas: I'm an early-stage investor at Heartcore Capital, a pan-European, sector-agnostic venture fund. I'm based in Prague and focus on pre-seed and seed across CEE, the Baltics, and DACH. The fund is generalist, but my own centre of gravity is applied and physical AI, defence, and blockchain. I started in consulting and investment banking, then spent a few years leading Solana ecosystem investments at a specialist crypto fund before moving to generalist venture. Outside of deals, I use coding assistants to build tools for myself: sourcing pipelines, crawlers, accounting tools, Chrome extensions. I got hooked on automation back in consulting, but with no engineering background I could only go so far. LLMs removed that ceiling.

Based on your experience, what are some of the frequent mistakes that startups make in their first steps?

Tomas: Every startup is different, so I'll generalize carefully. On the fundraising side, two recurring ones: messy cap tables from day one, and raising too early, before there's anything to show. On cap tables, be deliberate about how much equity goes to early advisors and non-operating co-founders. Any fund will look hard at anyone holding more than 5% because that could become dead equity, and it makes future rounds more difficult. On timing, it depends on the industry. Some require large blocks of capital years before commercial traction. But for most, no MVP, no design partners, and no clear path to monetization means no capital.

On the building side, the biggest is thinking locally and conservatively. Local is a scope problem: if the problem only exists in a single country, you've capped the company at the start. Conservative is an ambition problem. Neither is a fit for venture capital. The other one is the missing path: founders with a big vision who can't tell me what has to be true in the world for it to happen, or what they'll do in the next 12-18 months to move toward it. Vision without a path is as limiting as a lack of ambition.

Which sections of the pitch deck do you pay more attention to?

Tomas: Team, insight, and evidence. At Heartcore we index heavily on founders, and that's precisely why we stay sector agnostic. The best founders will pick the right industry to build a large outcome in, so we follow the founder rather than pick an industry and go hunting for someone to back in it. Founder assessment is always where I start.

Then I focus on the specific insight the team has about their industry and the problem they've set out to solve. Lastly, evidence: anything real. POCs, revenue, retention from an alpha group. The section I spend least time on is the top-down market slide. Every market is a hundred billion dollars on a slide.

What is the most interesting aspect of your job?

Tomas: The people. Founders come from wildly different backgrounds, and a large part of the job is understanding who someone actually is: how they were shaped, what makes them tick, why they're doing this rather than something easier. The best moments are when you meet someone who's deep in their domain and they transfer some of their excitement about it onto you. You walk out of the room caring about a problem you'd never thought about an hour earlier.

What are the top 3 traits that startups should have to be more appealing to investors?

Tomas: Cohesive team, learning rate, and active listening. The team around the founder matters as much as the founder. Early hires are often people you haven't worked with before, and the ability to build a functioning unit where each person has a clear role and a clear value add is a real predictor of success.

Learning rate is about showing progress from meeting to meeting. Take advice, or at least listen to it, and show speed of execution. That's what builds conviction on the investor side.

Active listening is the one people underestimate. First-time founders get nervous presenting to a partner or a room of them, and instead of answering the question they were asked, they retreat to the pitch they rehearsed. The skill is staying present in a stressful room: answer what was actually asked, react honestly whether you agree or disagree, hold your ground where you're right, and admit uncertainty where it exists. Saying "I don't know yet" is a show of strength and self-awareness. Repeating your deck at me is not.