How to Spot Bullshit in Pitches Without Looking Like a Pedant

A Series B founder pitched me last spring. The deck was good. The team was good. Slide eleven said, "We're seeing 10x improvement in retention versus the prior cohort." I asked what the prior-cohort number was. He said 8%. The new cohort was at 71%.

That's not 10x. That's a little under 9x. It's also a perfectly fine number on its own — 71% retention is great — and there was no reason to inflate it. But "10x" is the round number that lives in everyone's head after the meeting, and 9x is the actual figure, and the gap between them is the entire game.

This is what spotting bullshit in pitches mostly looks like. Not the spectacular fraud. The small, lazy upward rounding, the dodged follow-up, the metric whose definition shifts between slide six and slide fourteen. It's almost always banal. Catching it is the easy part. Catching it without making the room hate you is what takes practice.

The four common ones

Round-number inflation. Anything ending in zero in a pitch deserves one polite question. Is that the actual number, or is it rounded? Asked warmly, it lands fine. Asked coldly, it lands like an accusation. Tone does most of the work here.

Impossible unit economics. A founder will tell you their CAC is $80 and their primary acquisition channel is paid social. Then they'll mention, two slides later, that their LTV is $4,200. Both can be true. Often, neither is.

Dodged timeline questions. This one is so reliable you can set your watch by it. The question is when. The answer is how. The founder talks for ninety seconds about the technical approach, the team they've hired, the partnerships they're lining up. The actual date never appears. The polite move is to wait for the answer to end and then say, mildly, "And what's the date you're working toward?"

If the date doesn't come the second time, that is the answer.

Shifting metric definitions. The retention chart on slide nine uses revenue retention. The retention number quoted in the conversation, ten minutes later, is logo retention. They are very different numbers and they are being used interchangeably. This is not always intentional. It is always worth one clarifying question.

The pedant problem

Here's the actual hard part. Every one of these catches is correct. Every one of them, asked the wrong way, makes you look like the kind of investor founders warn each other about. The line between diligent and insufferable is mostly tone.

A few things help.

Ask in the warmest possible register. "Walk me through the math on that" is a friendly ask. "Your math is wrong" is not. They get to the same place.

Ask once, not three times. If the answer is evasive, note it silently and move on. Stacking pedantic questions is what makes you the meeting villain. One catch per topic.

Skip the small ones. If the founder rounded 18% to 20%, let it go. The catches that matter are the ones that change the conclusion.

And this is the one most investors get wrong: don't catch in front of the founder's team. If you have a substantive question, save it for the partner meeting or the follow-up. Catching a CEO in front of their CFO and head of sales costs you the relationship for nothing.

What you're actually doing

The point of this isn't to win the meeting. The point is that, six months from now, when the numbers come in differently than the deck implied, you want to have a clear record of which claims were soft. You want to know which numbers were rounded and which were real. You want to know which questions got answered and which got smoothly avoided.

Spotting bullshit in pitches is, in the end, mostly a memory exercise. You need to remember what was said, and what wasn't said, and which questions changed shape between asking and answering. Most people can't. The ones who can, quietly, are the ones with the better track record.