Something I’ve made peace with, reluctantly: most evaluation is built to reject, not to discover.
The point worth examining
The deck doesn’t win the investment. At best it buys 20 minutes. Every slide is a chance to disqualify. We scan for red flags, not green ones — because with a thousand decks and a handful of cheques, “no” is the efficient move.
But a machine tuned to reject will eventually reject things it shouldn’t — silently. False negatives don’t complain. The founder you wrongly passed on just goes elsewhere, or nowhere. You never find out.
What gets missed
So the real cost of a broken process is invisible by design. You only ever see the deals you did. Never the ones you fumbled.
“The whole point of a pitch deck is to help you say no. That should bother us.”
— ai.STARTUPJURY field note
That asymmetry should make all of us humble about how good our “gut” really is.
The evaluation problem
How would you even know if your process was quietly rejecting great companies?