The Deal Champion’s Blind Spot in VC Investment Committees

• Sahil Harwani
• August 6, 2026
• Blog
• #competewiser
• 0 Comments

The Deal Champion’s Blind Spot: Why the Person Who Loves a Deal Can’t Be the One Who Clears It

The partner who sourced a deal and wrote the memo has already invested identity and reputation in it before the IC meeting starts – which makes them structurally unable to grade it neutrally, no matter how disciplined they are. Formally assigning someone to play devil’s advocate helps, but research on the practice shows assigned dissent is weaker than genuine independent challenge. The more durable fix is a criteria-based check that doesn’t depend on any one person’s willingness to push back.

A partner told us, half-joking, about the deal he championed for four months, defended through two rounds of partner skepticism, and still closed – and how, eighteen months later, he was the last person in the firm willing to admit it was going sideways. “I’d spent too much of myself on it to be the one who called it,” he said. Nobody else on the team disagreed with him out loud until the numbers made it undeniable.

That’s not a story about one partner’s ego. It’s the predictable outcome of asking the same person to both champion a deal and grade it.

The pattern behind the discomfort

By the time a deal reaches investment committee, the sponsoring partner has usually done more than build a case for it – they’ve spent weeks with the founder, brought it in front of colleagues, and staked some visible amount of credibility on it being good. That’s not a flaw in how deals get sourced. It’s simply what conviction looks like before a decision is made.

The problem is what happens next: the same person who did all of that is frequently the one presenting the “objective” case for or against it, often including the risk section of their own memo. Sponsor bias isn’t a personality defect some partners have and others don’t – it’s a structural conflict of interest built into the sequence itself, the same way nobody expects a founder’s own projections to be the final word on their startup’s valuation.

Why most partnerships already know this and still don’t fix it

Almost every partner will agree, if asked directly, that a sponsor’s read on their own deal is not neutral. Very few partnerships have actually restructured their IC process around that admission, and the reason is uncomfortable to say out loud: assigning someone to formally challenge a colleague’s deal is socially costly in a small partnership, especially when that colleague will be sitting across the table on your own deal next quarter.

The workaround many firms reach for – designating a rotating “devil’s advocate” for each IC discussion – genuinely helps, and some private equity firms now formalize it seriously enough to build dedicated tooling around the role. But research on devil’s advocacy as a group decision-making technique has found a consistent gap: dissent that someone is assigned to perform tends to be weaker and less thorough than dissent from someone who actually, independently disagrees. An assigned skeptic can start performing skepticism rather than practicing it, especially the fifth time they’ve had to do it to a colleague they like.

What actually closes the gap

The firms that get this right don’t rely on any one person’s willingness to be the difficult voice in the room. A few patterns consistently work better:

• A standing, criteria-based checklist the deal has to clear, independent of the memo’s narrative – not “does the room feel convinced,” but a fixed set of questions applied identically whether the champion is the most persuasive partner in the firm or the newest one.
• Benchmarking the new deal against the fund’s own historical pattern, not against the sponsor’s argument for why this one is different – if the fund has passed on four similar deals for the same reason before, that’s a data point the room should see regardless of how well this pitch is delivered.
• Separating the scoring role from the sponsoring role structurally, not just by convention – someone other than the deal’s sponsor should be the one who runs it against the checklist, every time, not only on the deals where a partner happens to feel uneasy.

Where this actually breaks down in practice

The honest reason most funds don’t do this consistently is that it takes real discipline to apply a fixed checklist to every deal rather than treating diligence as a conversation that varies by how convincing the champion is that week – and it takes a system to keep that checklist consistent as memory and reasoning outlive any one partner’s tenure.

This is exactly the layer CompeteWiser’s gate framework is built to hold. Every deal is scored against the same fund-defined criteria at each gate, independent of who’s presenting it or how persuasively – and it’s benchmarked against how the fund has actually scored and outcome-tracked similar deals before, not against how this particular pitch is delivered. The champion still gets to be the champion. The system, not a designated colleague under social pressure, is what checks.

Want to see how a criteria-based gate actually separates sponsorship from evaluation? Email me at sahil@theprodzen.com.