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I have a 100-step checklist that I use to screen new investments. I’ve backed about 70 companies, but I’ve evaluated 40x that many — a dizzying amount of research. The fact is, a bot could do 80% of that work for me. After all, I have a series of questions and I need to fill in answers. This is the type of problem bots excel at solving.
This week, a team at Gigster built a model of what this bot might look like: Pitchbot.vc. It doesn’t ask all 100 of my questions, but it covers the same ground that I do as an angel investor. For example, the bot asks questions about who is on the founding team, what the market looks like, and how the idea has been validated.
Entrepreneurs can use Pitchbot to get a sense for the flow of a conversation with an investor, and even customize the bot to respond like an incubator, a seed fund, or a high-profile VC firm depending on whether they want to pitch Y Combinator, First Round Capital, or a16z.
Pitchbot screened 5,000 startup pitches in its first 24 hours of operation. If I were screening companies full-time, I might be able to research around 100.
I’m not about to take the proposed valuation and stake that Pitchbot offers entrepreneurs at the end of the Q&A and run with it, but it could still provide value to me as an investor. For instance, I would prioritize my own…