Big accelerators such as Y Combinator or a16z play their own game in their own league: using their reputation, market position, and network of influence, they can effectively use brute force and buy out the early-stage startup market entirely, admitting almost any promising founder who operates in a fast-growing market and fits the crude selection criteria: good pedigree, young age, some personal accolades as a sign of ambition. It’s almost like an index fund for early-stage frontier tech companies, effectively.

Individual investors cannot play that game; they have limited capital and limited personal time, and there is a trade-off: the more startups you put your money into, the more you offset the risks — but at the same time, the less time you can spend on effectively helping your proteges grow.

That’s why individual investors need a well-defined personal strategy to make clear, well-researched, highly selective bets. But how to do it?

The Product. The Market. The Team.

When I first came to the Bay Area, I started attending startup events and soon learned “The Big Three” formula that’s being repeated like a mantra: product, market, and team. That’s how you score a project, essentially — you have those three canonical dimensions to evaluate the deal.

But famous investors usually have their individual secret sauce, or angle, to take to deals. The investment game is a bit like playing poker — you can win in multiple ways, from pure mathematics or pure psychology, and so it goes for investment decisions as well.

One interesting case is the investment philosophy / thesis of Elad Gil, one of the most prominent angels in the recent history of Silicon Valley. Namely, he almost ignores the product part and instead focuses on finding flexible, dynamic founders in markets that leave them with plenty of space for pivoting and soft-pivoting. At the end of the day, most products need agility before they reach product-market fit, so why bother with an initial version? On many levels, it’s hard to disagree — the dynamic is what matters, not the starting point.

The Hidden Depth / The Hidden Dimensions.

And then, I looked a little deeper into that classic 3-dimensional model of early-stage investing. First of all, the San Francisco Bay Area is a hivemind with its own collective intelligence. It is something that happens somewhat between people and between teams, rather than within any individual team.

You often can’t put a finger on where innovation really happens, as it seems to be an emergent property of the community rather than an achievement of each team separately.

The 3-Body Problem: On Riding Dragons and the Dragon Fire.

After interacting with lots of founders over these 4 years spent partially in the Silicon Valley, and partially outside, I can clearly see that there is not one fit-them-all strategy.

Founders differ in personalities, natural working style, and personal experiences, and their startups differ in the dynamics of the market and the product.

Some products can catch like a fire and go viral; others require systematic sales B2B by an experienced sales team. Some products require massive capital, while others could also be bootstrapped in the AI-first agentic economy. Some products require years of research and developing original protectable IP in sweat and tears; others have high barriers to entry, but that results in fierce market competition.

And depending on the nature of this market dynamic, different sources of stress will emerge on the way, which brings us back to founders and their individual ability to hold on under pressure. Every nervous system is different and fragile toward different classes of stressors — you’ve got to find the pain that is less painful to you than to most people.

And so I started seeing the problem of finding a “perfect blend” as the three-body problem: you need a click between a founder, their startup’s business model, and the overall GTM strategy — it’s a matter of fit, not the „founder,” „product,” and „market” separately.

I’d compare it to riding a dragon: you’ve got a dragon and a dragon rider, and they need to choose each other and fit together (…and then blast a lot of dragon fire to win the battle — but the fit still comes first).

If you choose the wrong dragon, it will burn you alive. And that’s what often happens to founders in San Francisco: they give it all, they eventually burn out, and leave the city empty-handed.

And even if your dragon is small and light, it can still be swift and smart, and make a dent. Appearances are often misleading.

And this is also why initiatives such as The Residency are gaining in strength these days: the best deals happen when the investor can observe the process of the dragon rider getting on the dragon’s back firsthand.

My Story with Pitch Nights: The Great Experiment.

And so here we are, on stage in San Francisco. Pitch & demo nights have a reputation as chaotic marketplaces where “not much happens after all” — so why organize them in the first place?

Well, the origin story is quite long. First of all, right at the end of my PhD in Computational Neuroscience, in 2017-2018, I lost all my money in crypto, and that’s how I learned that it’s not textbook knowledge but street knowledge — a mature nervous system and real-world experience — will help you develop a good relationship with money and learn investing.

You need that tacit knowledge and intuition that can only come from watching founders and their projects winning and failing — and investors winning and failing accordingly.

As I learned in academia, it takes 5-10 years of gaining experience through projects (plus observing other people’s projects succeed or go down in flames) to develop the feel for „what’s a good project?”, “how to play the game of risks and rewards?” and „how to recognize the right person to work with?”

When I came to the Bay Area in 2022, I started observing, and it soon became clear that to really understand how the decisions are made, I need to get behind the curtain. And since I was new in town, that effectively meant creating the curtain in the first place, that is, running my own events.

Is it a lot of work? Hell yes. But, I treat the startup world as my home, or my womb, not my workplace; that’s why spending my free time on non-profit events never feels like lost time.

Also, I bootstrap. As a bootstrapper, you need to understand what real „multitasking” is: it’s not doing multiple things at a time but choosing tasks that serve to multiple purposes at a time. And, community events are perfect for that purpose:

First, you can help people and, as such, acquire valuable contacts and open doors in the Valley, which makes good karma circle back, and greatly helps in playing the reputation game.

Secondly, running events with the Future of Work as a vertical, not only builds reputation long term, but also provides useful information — who is closer to what’s happening in the world of work than us, people who mingle with early-stage startups building the Future of Work? Even huge and prestigious outlets such as Forbes or Business Insider do not have that source of information. It’s a great business leverage with little to no capital involved.

And so my journey as a community builder and event organizer in San Francisco has started.

I worked with three co-organizers on the way, Atal, Steven, and Geraldine — and they all left for independent reasons. Atal focused on other startup events; they gave him a better ROi for his company. Steven runs events as a business, and this vertical simply isn’t profitable in the startup world. Geraldine had to also focus on events where the audience is closer to her ICP.

Today, I don’t even have a formal co-organizer; instead, I collaborate with community partners — other builders in the space with whom we have some synergies so that we can effectively help each other.

Is organizing an effective pitch or demo night easy? Hell no.

As my friend Daniel Theobald likes to say, „everyone lies in Silicon Valley.” I guess it is true in any high-stakes, cutthroat, and innovation-based environment (#academia): the higher the stakes, the more lies, false advertising, and political games. It’s a conservation law of sorts: in environments with long-tail distribution of income, almost all cash, splendor, respect, and professional satisfaction land in the hands of a few, so there is a great incentive to use all means possible to escape the tail.

So, are the decks and the pitches even reliable? How to create a system that (1) treats people equally, (2) is measurable, and yet, (3) filters projects out along with the right angle?

I can see two trends in early-stage investing: going with brute force and blasting money into a wide portfolio in emerging markets the “YC style” (using pattern recognition a’la “Stanford dropout with pimples,” obviously) without getting too deep into any single deal, or quite the opposite: going as deep into the process as possible and observing talent building from day one, “The Residency style”: founder-first hands-on approach, community building, quality matching that aims for a nearly 100% match quality between investors and startups (the “quality over quantity” approach).

Pitch nights are neither of these trends; that’s why most pitch nights don’t work out in the first place. I had to experiment and tweak the rules a little every time to see what worked and what didn’t.

But I was stubborn, and I persevered.

The State of Affairs as of Today: My Personal Investment Thesis.

Despite not having any clear playbook or any way to monetize my work on events in the foreseeable future. Three mini-conferences and seven pitch nights later, the events grew to 1,000+ registrations and a ton of people in my personal network.

What’s my “investment thesis” at the moment? Letting people on stage based on submitted decks is never a precise system for potential detection, but followign the “dragon rider” concept, I’d summarize the criteria as follows:

1. Unique story: a founder with a unique story that makes them perfect to solve the problem. Their story needs to be so logical that it feels like everything they have ever done in their life led them to this moment in space and time. They need to prove they are THE #1 PERSON worldwide to solve this particular issue.
2. Original, protectable IP — unique data, trade secret, patent, or market insight that’s uniquely theirs.
3. Smart GTM strategy that is likely to be a flywheel, even if the ARR is not high just yet.

These three are usually interdependent: a well-rounded foudner who tackles the right problem with the right mindset will often have both IP and distribution strategy as well — they both come naturally if you have a deep understanding of the problem you are solving and dig deep enough.

Would you like to come see if this approach works, please JOIN US at the future events — please find the roster of the upcoming pitch & demo nights HERE.