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.