Week 1: The Start

Quick recap of Week 0 before I get into it: I introduced my research question: How does AI affect the due-diligence process for startups, and how has it changed relative to prior processes before AI dominated the analysis? I also laid out my plan to explore it through my internship at Bright Ventures, an early-stage VC firm in New York.

My whole week ended up being virtual because of some scheduling conflicts, but I still had work to do. It started with me sitting in on calls for a few of Bright Ventures’ portfolio companies. Before the calls, I went through the investment memos and pitch decks for each company to get some background, jotting down important information on them. I also tried to connect everything back to my research question the whole time, thinking about which parts of that process AI might be changing. Later in the week I started working on my investor survey, which is going to be one of my main research tools. I hope to send it out to VC professionals through Bright Ventures’ network, so I spent a lot of time making sure the questions actually flow well and build on each other — starting with how due diligence worked before AI, then moving into how it works now, and ending with some open reflection questions. 

At the end of my week, I had a check-in meeting with my on-site mentors. I went in thinking AI’s biggest impact on due diligence was just making things faster, but they explained that Bright now evaluates startups on three AI-specific layers: how AI is changing the market the startup is in, whether the product is actually AI-native, and whether the technology handles data responsibly. AI has to be additive; It needs to genuinely help users, not just extract value from them. Most notably, because AI moves so much faster and at a bigger scale than past technologies, the cost of a wrong investment decision is way higher now than it used to be. Everything I learned from this week will definitely help to contribute to my research for this project.

Next week, I will be on-site, so I will have more information to go off of from there. I hope to understand more about the due-diligence process next week through the work Bright Ventures gives me! More updates in the coming weeks!