“It's shocking how few founders have a basic monthly P&L in their data room. Often I'll get a response that says, we have very little revenue. But other than revenue, there are expenses that show up on that document.”
The Startup CPG Podcast · Alternative Proteins · October 2026
Context
A listener asked what founders should have ready in a data room, and when. Brandon, an early-stage consumer investor, lists the basics he asks for, starting with the one most founders skip.
Transcript
…go into a bunch of really great independents before getting that sprouts win or that Whole Foods win. Now we have Central Marku, which is super exciting. But yeah, I'm really excited to see what I believe will be a really great success in a launch at one of these really big natural retailers. Well,
…the largest Slack community in the industry with now over 40,000 members. I'd love to pull a question directly from our channel and have you answer it as a case study for any founder that might have a similar question. Today's question is: when and what should you have prepared in a data room?
Yeah, I think it's funny. Like I typically ask my founders the same thing every beginning of every process when we're deciding to go into deeper due diligence. And one of them I find so basic, but it's shocking how few of founders have this in their data room, which is a basic monthly PL. And oftentimes I'll get a response that says, well, you know, we have no revenue. You know that we have very little revenue. And, you know, other than revenue, there are expenses that show up on that document. It's so between PL, a balance sheet, and a cash flow statement, the sort of three main financial statements. And I don't love to wear my investment banker hat, but I do have to at the beginning of these processes. Those are kind of like basic items to include in a data room. And then ideally, if you have Velocity's data, that's very interesting and relevant to review. If you have a list of retailers, I typically, I think I asked you for this, but like a list of all the retailers you're in, the date you enter…
Super helpful. Lindsay, do you have any color to add or also maybe could expound a little bit on when you had your data room prepared and were you waiting for requests to come in to then populate something? Or did you kind of have some of the documents ready to go or thinking about that in advance?
Yeah. I mean, I had a lot of the information on hand, but then of course I wanted to like package it in a way that was like easy to read and, you know, not totally crazy because I think you're often doing so many different things at once as a founder. I think something that was hard for me to…
think that's super helpful color and context coming from the founder side. And I think it's so true. I think the realities of running a business are like until you reach a certain scale. It's the same thing as economies of scale when you're thinking about your cogs, right? Until you reach a certain…
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