Early 2004, we were sketching what would become local.ch, and one call we made early was to put the map at the center of the whole experience. We bet on a small Lucerne company called Endoxon to supply it. Digital maps were rough back then, nobody had a good experience yet, and plenty of people told us a directory did not need to look like this.
Two years later, December 2006, Google bought the mapping half of Endoxon outright, to build the European coverage for Google Maps and Google Earth. The person who built the thing we bet on went on to run Google’s Maps team in Zurich for close to fifteen years afterward. Nobody told us we were right in 2004. Google told us in 2006, by buying the same company we already trusted.
It happened again, years later, at Squirro. We placed an early bet on retrieval augmented models, back when we called it retrieval augmented LLM, before the Americans found a catchier name for it and it became RAG. At the time the room’s honest question was, how could a technology that mostly hallucinates ever be trustworthy enough to replace search. We built on it anyway.
None of this would have survived a pitch deck. A deck argues for a future that has not happened yet, and by the time anyone can check whether it was right, the deck has already done its only job, raised the round or not. Investors know this too, ask any of them and they will tell you they do not expect your numbers to be accurate, only defensible. Nobody at the table is actually testing the claim. They are testing the argument.
What actually got tested, twice, was not a slide, it was thirty years of pattern recognition against reality. Research on when expert intuition can genuinely be trusted, not just believed, found it takes two things, a reasonably predictable environment, and a very large number of real decisions with real feedback, often described as tens of thousands of hours of it. Kahneman wrote his famous book on “thinking fast and slow” and won a Noble Prize for it.
The same research is just as clear about the other half. Outside that kind of feedback loop, in an unpredictable environment, confident intuition is often no better than a coin flip, sometimes worse, and it feels exactly the same from the inside either way. Two calls landing right is not proof the method never fails. It is evidence that, those two times, the conditions were actually there to trust it.
So here is the actual lesson, thirty years in. It taught me to trust my gut for some decisions, and never to trust it in others, and no pitch deck, mine or anyone else’s, will ever tell you which decision you are standing in. Only the years will.
If you have made a call like that, one that took years to get proven right by someone else’s decision, not your own, I would like to hear which decision you thought of in similar terms.
