[derefr]

Sure, but at the same time, the relationship between founders and VCs isn't actually adversarial. VCs want founders to know how to pitch them. VCs are not “anti-inductive”† — they’re not shifting their requirements to become stranger and more complex every time they’re understood. Their needs are fairly stable. The main reason that most pitches don’t succeed, is that most founders are first-time founders, and therefore don’t have experience at pitching, and therefore make newbie mistakes.

† https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/h24JGbmweNpWZfBkM/markets-ar...

If you’ve ever heard publishers talk about the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slush_pile submissions they receive, it’s much the same: they have clear and stable and “knowable” expectations, but authors break them, because most authors are new authors submitting their very first manuscript, having never gone through this process before, never received feedback before, and so never had any data with which to polish their approach before.

(The other main reason that VCs and publishers both receive so many pitches they don’t feel fit them, is that the markets they operate in are heavily slanted in their favour, and so they don’t put much work into making their requirements known. They often don’t put their expectations on their websites or anything. This can be circumvented on the supply-side, though, by just asking around to find out from other submitters what a given buyer is looking for. Some enterprising souls have even done the “lazy” supply-side’s work for it, and compiled indices of the requirements for the buyers in the market.)