Nowadays, in the second or third minute of nearly every pitch meeting, you can see the investor’s expression change. not interested in thrills. Without a doubt. Into something more bizarre: a silent computation unrelated to the numbers on the slide. The room is being read by them. The founder is being read by them. They are reading the vibe, to use the term that everyone in the industry has grudgingly embraced.
The speed at which this occurred is difficult to ignore. A clean deck three years ago indicated that the work had been completed by a founder. spoke with clients. struggled with unit economics. The deck wasn’t the product; it was a byproduct. The same deck can now be created in an afternoon, polished by AI tools that have been trained on thousands of successful Series A presentations, and given to a founder who hasn’t yet engaged with a single actual customer. Most VCs are aware that the signal is broken.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Topic | The rise of “vibe” as a decision-making metric in venture capital |
| Industry Context | Early-stage venture capital, post-AI disruption |
| Notable Trigger | AI-generated decks, vibe-coded products, inflated top-of-funnel signals |
| Key Tools Reshaping Pitches | Lovable, Cursor, Replit, AI deck generators |
| Reference Source | Jeff Becker, Monday Morning Meeting, March 2026 |
| Parallel Commentary | Tony Fish, opengovernance.net, March 2026 |
| Era of Shift | 2024 onward, accelerating sharply through 2025–2026 |
| Founder Behavior Change | Three-week company builds, paid waitlists, polished Loom demos |
| Investor Behavior Change | Vibe-matching over persuasion, gut-feel calls |
| Cultural Mood | Skeptical, exhausted, quietly nostalgic for old signal |
As a result, they now trust someone else. Something more delicate. The founder’s pause before responding. their conviction’s texture. Whether they sound like they’ve been speaking with people on the phone at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday or if they’ve just read about it on a Substack. It’s like “listening for the load-bearing sentences” when a founder says something that couldn’t have been produced by a model, according to one investor I spoke with. It’s an odd skill to learn. It’s also becoming more and more the only one that counts.
This is not a mystery in terms of its mechanics. These tools—Lovable, Cursor, and Replit—have reduced the gap between an idea and what appears to be a business. Over the course of a weekend, founders are creating landing pages that generate higher conversion rates than those created in 2021 by ten-person teams. Demos have a polished feel. Sometimes waitlists expand due to paid acquisition masquerading as natural momentum. The codebase is frequently what one investor famously referred to as “prompt chains and prayers.” Everything appears to be in order. Being one is still the difficult part.
Speaking with those who have been doing this for decades gives me the impression that something has been subtly reversed. In an article published in early March, Tony Fish contended that venture capital has spent thirty years refining itself to the point where it is no longer able to support the truly discontinuous. The professionalization was successful. The procedures solidified. Then AI came along and made every startup’s surface layer look the same. When the polish is universal, what remains are the founder’s unique qualities, instincts, and refusal to sound like everyone else. the atmosphere.
It becomes intriguing and a little awkward at this point. Vibe-matching is not a tool for meritocracy. Founders who already fit the description, speak the valley’s rhythm, and resemble the previous winner the partner supported are rewarded. It’s possible that the industry has unintentionally reinforced its oldest prejudice—the prejudice toward people who feel familiar—by compensating for the noise produced by AI.
As this develops, the question is not whether vibe as a metric will decline. Most likely, it won’t—at least not anytime soon. The question is whether anyone in the venture capital industry is willing to publicly acknowledge that the most costly choices in the global startup economy are now being made based solely on intuition, and whether this intuition is wisdom or merely what remains after all other signals have lost their significance.
