An investor spends about two minutes on a deck the first time. Often less.
The point worth examining
Two minutes to decide whether a company someone spent two years building gets a conversation.
We call it efficient. At volume, it has to be. But let’s not pretend two minutes is evaluation. It’s triage — and triage tuned for speed always favours the familiar over the interesting.
What gets missed
The deck that pattern-matches to last year’s winner gets through. The genuinely novel one — the one that doesn’t fit the template — reads as “confusing” and gets closed.
“A 90-second review isn’t diligence. It’s a coin flip dressed up as judgment.”
— ai.STARTUPJURY field note
So our fastest filters may be quietly screening out the exact non-obvious ideas we claim to hunt for.
The evaluation problem
Thiel’s question cuts deep here: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
The best answers to that never look good in a two-minute skim.
Where judgment belongs
So what are we really filtering for — quality, or legibility?