Investors are trapped in an age of illusions.

AI has made it so easy to create a slick, impressive product, deck, and pitch that it's hard to know whether a business is real or a mirage at the earliest stages. It is so easy to create something that looks amazing, but isn't real.

A long time ago, just setting up a web app was a huge lift and if you could do it the technical skills of your team were established. Then the cloud made that trivial.

For a while, building a complex product with a well-designed interface was a heavy lift and doing so established the skills of your team again. AI is making that trivial. 

So, how do investors know whether something is real or just a mirage? That's the key question facing investors who can no longer rely on the tools they used even a year ago. 

The reality is that evaluating early-stage companies has never been easy, so investors adopted crutches to try and do some of the evaluation for them. Now those crutches are removed and the hard work can no longer be avoided. Digging into the tech, the team, the market, the customers, and the problem has never been more important. 

However, that takes time. YC trained investors to make a decision in hours, maybe days. Real research can take weeks, and rushing into these decisions guarantees you'll fall for mirages. 

The answer is to avoid the hype, stick to fundamentals, and do the hard work. No more crutches, no more rushes. At Near Horizon, we engage with companies for 30 to 60 days before committing which means we get a complete perspective of the people, problem and market. No shortcuts, just a long run of hard work. 

Sounds like a lot? Investors need to be stewards of their LPs’ money in a way that requires an entirely new level of effort. Putting in the hours should be a standard part of the process. 

I think this is great for the industry, but it does require change. We'll see who rises to the occasion!

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