Can investors adequately assess founders over video, or is meeting in person necessary?

Shervin Pishevar · Jan 13, 2025

Founder meetings should be taken in person rather than by phone, because you cannot sense a founder's brilliance remotely

He passed on Pinterest's seed round after taking Ben Silbermann's pitch as a call; the presentation didn't land, whereas meeting in person would have revealed his brilliance

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Jake Saper · Mar 10, 2025

In-person time with a founder is important enough to conviction that it is worth extreme logistical effort to get it

The walk let him understand the founder's vision and the person himself, and vice versa, in a way remote contact wouldn't; partners who couldn't travel substituted one-on-one Zoom calls with both founders

Scope: said in the context of COVID travel restrictions; remote one-on-ones with each partner can partially substitute

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Nabeel Hyatt · Apr 4, 2025 · hedged

He will essentially not invest without meeting a founder in person, and if a deal is fast he compresses many in-person meetings into a week rather than skipping them

Deep familiarity with how a founder internalizes information — built over years or crammed into days — is what makes the decision possible

Scope: exception if you already know them well from years earlier

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Harry Stebbings · Oct 22, 2025

He will not make an investment without meeting the founder in person

Investing remotely in 2021 led to bad investment decisions; meeting someone in person conveys energy and charisma you can't get otherwise

Scope: a rule adopted after 2021 mistakes

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Harry Stebbings · Nov 28, 2025

His worst investments were all made remotely in 2021 because you can't assess a founder's substance without meeting them in person

You miss how they look you in the eye, how they open the door, how they carry themselves

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Josh Browder · May 18, 2026

Founders should refuse Zoom pitches and travel to meet investors in person wherever possible

Scope: where possible

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Harry Stebbings · Jun 20, 2026

In-person interviews are roughly ten times better than remote ones

The friendship and physical presence allowed a more open, authentic and transparent conversation

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Katherine Boyle · Oct 1, 2020

It is very difficult to be a great investor while quarantined, because you can only listen to mononarratives online rather than getting ground truth from people

You have to get out and speak to people to know what's actually happening on the ground; she flew to her hometown in Northern Florida for six weeks to do exactly that

40:08 Quarantine limits investors to online mononarratives so in person ground truthing is necessary

Jason Lemkin · Nov 30, 2022

The value of meeting founders face to face is building trust, not judging character — VCs over-index on their ability to suss out a founder in person

Many founders are great bullshit artists (Sam Bankman-Fried and friends), and there are too many different cultures for a walk-and-talk to make you a great student of human nature; what relationships actually produce is more honesty and less baloney, like old-school sales

47:01 In person meetings build trust rather than reveal character investors overrate their ability to judge founders face to face

Jason Lemkin · May 6, 2022

Investing over Zoom is worse, not because in-person reading of founders is a superpower but because it destroys the rumination cadence that made decisions good

Pre-COVID he could read the deck, ruminate for a week or ten days, then use a single in-person meeting to confirm and commit within twenty minutes; Zoom forces the decision into the first call and makes the process transactional and less emotionally engaging

43:48 Remote investing hurts not by losing face to face reads but by destroying deliberate decision cadence