We send the intro requests.
You close the round.

Because we'd be promising you something we don't control. An intro happens when an investor says yes. We can control who we ask, how warm the routing is, how well the ask is written, and how many go out — so that's what we commit to.

Anyone promising you intros is either padding the number with investors who'll take any meeting, or is about to miss. The honest unit is the request.

Any request where the investor engaged: they took the intro, took a first or second meeting, came back with follow-up questions, asked to circle back when the round opens, or invested. All of those are yeses of different sizes, and all count in your favor.

A pass or a hard ignore counts against you. A request still in flight counts for nothing in either direction until it resolves.

In the math, yes — both land in the denominator as "decided" and neither lands in the numerator. That feels harsh, but it's the right call: an investor who doesn't even reply to a warm, well-matched intro request is telling you something about the pitch just as clearly as one who writes back "not for us."

Across the network, ignores are 33% of all requests. They're normal. They're also the single biggest lever you have.

No — you're being protected. Below 17% acceptance, every additional request spends a warm relationship on a pitch the market is telling us isn't ready. Those investors don't come back for this round.

The work doesn't stop, it moves. Gym reps, pitch review, and messaging rework are what get you back up the ladder. A slow week is a redirect, never a demotion.

Continuously. Your accept rate is recomputed as requests resolve, and your pace follows it. There's no review cycle, no monthly reset, and no one arguing your case internally — it's arithmetic.

The practical floor is sample size: we need at least 4 decided requests before we trust a rate at all. Below that you sit at a neutral 2 per week.

Two ways. Bonus shots ride on top of your pace — a founder at 5/week holding 3 shots gets 8 requests that week. And the blitz overrides the ladder entirely at 20/week for 21 days once you land a lead.

There is no way to buy your way past the ladder. The only currency is acceptance.

So they get used. A cap that banks forever turns into a hoard — founders grind Gym reps for a month, then dump 15 requests into the network at once, which is exactly the kind of unwarm blast we exist to avoid.

Three outstanding, spend them, earn more. Excess beyond the cap is not banked.

Because bonus requests are a volume lever, and volume only helps when conversion is already working. Handing extra requests to a founder converting at 12% doesn't accelerate their raise — it accelerates the rate at which they run out of investors.

Get to 20%, then the Gym and the CRM start paying you back in requests.

We generate the matches — scored on fit, on how likely the routing node is to forward it, and on the investor's own reliability history — and you have visibility into them. The engine won't route to investors who ghost, and it retires nodes whose forward rate drops too low.

You can always add your own investor relationships to your CRM. That's one of the three ways to earn bonus shots.

The pace, the matching, the routing, and the accept-rate math are software — that's what lets us run it for every founder at once without it degrading into spray-and-pray.

The advice is Mat. Deck teardowns, positioning, round strategy, the draft of your investor update, who to see when you're in a city for a week, who to pull into the thread. That's a text away, and it isn't going to be automated — the whole point is that someone who has seen a hundred of these is looking at yours.

Yes — it's just a different strategy, and it's worth being clear about the difference.

Pre-seed is a search for one believer. You're hunting for the first check that anchors everything after it. So the engine is tuned for discovery: read the signal, pace to what's converting, and blitz the moment a lead appears.

Seed is an auction. You have traction, and the job is to get the right investors looking at the same time, compress them into the same window, and let competitive pressure set your terms. That's a different use of the same network — less about finding a yes, more about timing and stacking the yeses you can already see.

Same intros, same advice, same 1%. Different playbook once you're in it — and Mat will tell you which one you're actually running.

No. The IRL programming runs out of Phoenix today and we'll add cities as the portfolio concentrates in them, but the product — intros and advice — is remote and always has been. Founders raise from everywhere.

Come if you can. The founders who show up get more out of the portfolio than the ones who don't, but nobody's pace depends on it.

Every MatCap founder is in one group chat. It's where you ask what an investor is actually like before you take the meeting, what a fair price is for the round you're about to run, and whether anyone has hit the exact wall you just hit.

It's additive, not the product. But it's the fastest place to get an honest answer from someone with no incentive to sell you anything.

1% — for all of it: the intros, the advice, Phoenix, and the group chat. No retainer and no monthly fee, so we don't get paid for activity. We get paid when you close.

Which means our incentive and yours are the same one: your accept rate has to be real, and the round has to actually happen.