No one knows

Published 6 months ago • 1 min read

No one knows what investors are looking for

Not even the investors themselves.

If they did, the whole process would look very different. Investors would just ask for the specific information, compare the answers, and make decisions quickly. But the investment process in deep-tech is long, iterative, and deeply human.

That’s not to say investors aren’t qualified. Seasoned investors absolutely know how to invest to achieve the outcomes they desire - but they can’t give you a formula.

Knowing how to do something is not the same as knowing what you’re doing explicitly. In philosophy, this is the difference between procedural and propositional knowledge.

An experienced music producer can tell within seconds whether a song will resonate, yet can’t isolate that decisive variable. Their knowledge is embodied; it comes from exposure to thousands of similar situations and their outcomes. It’s essentially pattern recognition.

Likewise, investors have trained their intuition through years of experience with founders, pitches, and results. They operate in an “I’ll know it when I see it” mode. That’s why the investment process evolved the way it did — it gives investors enough exposure to recognize the patterns they trust.

This is a universal human dynamic in our pursuit of value. Once something becomes an explicit value marker - say, market size - it stops being a differentiator, because every founder adjusts for it. The real opportunity signals always remain underground: patterns investors can sense but not describe.

If investors don’t know what they’re looking for, you certainly don’t either. Trying to prove you’re what they want makes no sense - and misses the real opportunity: discovering together what it might be.

Yours,

Sagi

Part 2 - examples and principles for investor pitching

In the previous newsletter, I shared a talk I gave at Nest Catalyst about investor pitching. That first talk focused on the mindset behind pitching complex ideas. This second talk is more practical. It focuses on how to approach shaping your pitch - through principles and examples. The last five minutes are especially practical: an easy framework to help you craft your narrative. This was quite challenging. After years of doing this work, a lot of it has become intuitive. Breaking it down to...

11 days ago • 1 min read

A decade of investor pitching insights - in one video

If you've ever struggled to move people toward a complex new idea, or if you just want to finally understand what it is that I do (like my parents), Or you just feel like watching something interesting … I finally had the opportunity to record a talk I’ve been piecing together for years. I had the pleasure of speaking to a group of scientist-entrepreneurs at Nest Catalyst - a Bay Area program supporting life science founders building companies in the biotech ecosystem. The talk is visual,...

about 1 month ago • 1 min read

Vision as Responsibility

There's a way to improve your startup by orders of magnitude in 10 seconds.Here’s what you do:Go to your email signature and add this to your title: CVO, Chief Visionary Officer. (You can keep your CEO title or replace it — I don’t mind.)Boom! You just made your startup more effective and drastically increased your chances of building a great product.By assuming the CVO title, you made something explicit that most startups leave vague: that there is a single source of intent in the system....