Nobody wants to admit this, so I will: deck #3 and deck #33 don’t get the same reviewer.
The point worth examining
Same rubric. Same criteria. Completely different human.
By late afternoon, patience is gone, pattern-matching takes over, and “next” becomes the default. It isn’t laziness — it’s biology. Attention is finite, and most of it gets spent before lunch.
What gets missed
An associate at an active fund can screen 30 to 40 decks a day. Be honest about how much real thought the last ten get.
“Your screening process isn’t objective. It’s just tired.”
— ai.STARTUPJURY field note
We’ve built a system that demands fresh judgment thousands of times a year from people who run out of it by 2pm — then we call the output “objective.”
The evaluation problem
It isn’t. It’s a run of increasingly exhausted gut calls, and where your deck lands in that sequence may matter as much as what’s in it.
“Work harder” isn’t the answer. Fatigue was never a willpower problem.
Where judgment belongs
How does your team handle the decks that land at the bottom of the pile?