Sparkle vs. Substance

Every pitch is some mix of sparkle and substance. Venture picks sparkle almost every time, and it costs us.

Every founder walks into a pitch with some mix of two things: sparkle and substance.

Sparkle is charisma. It’s the deck that feels like a movie trailer. The perfectly timed pause. Sparkle is performance, storytelling, energy. It’s the thing that makes a room lean forward. Sparkle makes you feel something.

Substance is depth. It’s a founder who has thought about their problem space so deeply that they can answer your fifth “why” as clearly as your first. Substance is precision, clarity of thought, accumulated knowledge. It’s the thing that holds up when you start asking hard questions.

The best founders have both. They sell a massive vision and know every detail that makes it real. These founders are rare. They’re worth whatever price they’re raising at.

But venture selects for sparkle over substance almost every time. And it costs us.

Sparkle without substance is just sales. And great salespeople can sell anything. They sell a vision they can’t build. They sell traction that’s not quite there. They sell a moat that doesn’t exist.

These founders raise easily. They often raise the most. And they often build the least.

You see it play out the same way every time. The fundraise goes great. The press is flattering. The brand grows. Then two years later the growth was bought, not earned. Retention is terrible. The team is churning. But the founder is already out raising the next round, because sparkle compounds in venture even when the business doesn’t.

This isn’t just a VC problem. We’re in a moment where performance has replaced depth. The best self-promoter gets the followers. The best storyteller gets the funding. The best networker gets the opportunity. And the person who’s actually best at the work is heads down, not playing the game. Overlooked. Unappreciated.

Give me the founder who maybe isn’t the smoothest in the room, but when you sit across from them and start pulling threads, every single thread holds. The person who has extreme clarity on what’s true, what’s hard, and what they don’t know yet. That’s the founder who builds something durable.

A pitch ends. The work doesn’t.