The venture investor and founder shares the habits, decisions, and disciplines that separate early-stage companies that survive from those that stall.
Across the UK and Europe, thousands of startups launch each year with promising ideas, capable teams, and early funding. Most of them will not survive their first three years. Experian research puts the three-year failure rate for new businesses at around 50%, with cash flow problems cited as a leading cause in the majority of closures. The question experienced investors return to is not which companies had the best idea at launch. It is which founders built the right habits in the months immediately after going live.
Alexander Kopylkov, a venture capital investor and founder with more than 20 years of experience backing companies across Europe and North America, has a clear view on this. “The first six months are not a grace period,” Kopylkov says. “They are the period when a company’s character gets set. Whatever rhythms and disciplines the founder builds then tend to stay.”
Kopylkov has backed some of the world’s most recognized technology companies, including Telegram, Anthropic, Canva, and Replit. Across that portfolio, and through years of working directly with early-stage founders in the UK and European ecosystem, he has observed consistent patterns in how the strongest operators use the time between launch and the six-month mark.
They Talk to Customers Before They Improve the Product
One of the clearest signals Kopylkov looks for in a newly launched company is whether the founder is spending more time talking to customers than improving the product. Research consistently shows that around 42% of startups fail due to a lack of market demand, which typically traces back to building features customers never asked for.
“Strong founders treat early customer conversations as data collection,” Kopylkov notes. “They are not trying to win the customer over in every meeting. They are trying to understand what the customer actually needs, which is often different from what was assumed at launch.”
In European markets, where customer budgets tend to be more scrutinized than in the US, this discipline matters more. A founder who has 20 detailed customer conversations in the first three months after launch has something more valuable than a product update. They have a real picture of who is paying and why.
They Build Financial Discipline Before It Becomes Urgent
Alexander Kopylkov recommends that founders in the UK and Europe calculate their unit economics, meaning how much it costs to acquire a customer and how much that customer is worth over time, within the first 60 days of launch. He advises updating those numbers every month without fail.
In 2026, European venture capital is more concentrated than it was three years ago. More money is flowing into fewer deals: globally, deal volume fell to its lowest point since 2020, and in the first half of 2025 alone, just 11 companies captured more than a third of all global venture capital. Investors are applying stricter scrutiny to early-stage companies. Founders who arrive at a fundraising conversation with six months of clean financial data are in a fundamentally different position from those who are only starting to calculate their numbers when they need capital.
“Discipline around money is not just about survival,” Kopylkov says. “It is a signal to every person who will eventually work with you or invest in you. It tells them how you make decisions under pressure.”
They Hire Slowly and With Precision
The first six months after launch are too early for most founders to know what skills they actually need. Kopylkov is direct on this: bringing in senior hires before the product and customer profile are stable tends to create costs and confusion at a moment when a company needs speed and flexibility.
“Hire for the problem you have today, not the company you think you will have in two years,” Kopylkov advises. “Premature hiring is one of the fastest ways a newly launched company starts consuming its own runway.”
They Build Investor Relationships Before They Need Investment
For Alexander Kopylkov, one of the clearest differences between founders who raise successfully and those who struggle is how they use the early post-launch period in relation to investors. Strong founders begin building relationships with potential investors well before they need capital, using the six months after launch to establish a track record rather than making cold approaches when they are already running short on time.
In his view, by the time a UK or European founder sits down for a seed or Series A round in 2026, the investor should already have six months of context about how that person operates. The product will have changed. The numbers will look different. But the founder’s judgment and discipline will already be on record.
The Discipline Is the Product
The common thread across all of these practices is that the strongest founders treat discipline itself as something they are actively building. The routines established in the first six months, around customers, finances, hiring, and investor relationships, become the operating system the company runs on for years.
“A lot of founders think the product is what they are selling to customers,” Kopylkov says. “But at this stage, the way you run the company is as important as what you are building. Investors see both.”
