We meet 100s of companies, and can only rarely say yes
Email overload. Sometimes we genuinely get more emails (all requiring real responses or action) than a person can reasonably manage. Losing emails in this is real - have grace the first time we don’t respond (but not the second).
Saying no is really hard, from an emotional and relational perspective. This is #1 reason for ghosting, although it gets justified as, “we’re leaving the door open in case we decide later on to get involved.” It’s hard to say no and not feel like a jerk, especially because there are different reasons, and not all of them can be readily shared (see below)
Sometimes we meet companies that we know will fail. We could be honest (and give the founder another data point on how a VC thinks about something), but we usually won’t because 1. It’s too easy to miscommunicate and be mean 2. No one wants to be a downer (jk, some people do), and that reputation can spread, hurting future deal flow and brand and 3. There’s always a chance that things change radically, and “our job” is to see the moonshots. All of which to say, VC appetite shouldn’t be a strong consideration when someone is starting a company because VCs have too many incentives not to be completely honest.
We usually have strong, clear theses, or at least preferences, but we try not to emphasize that publicly because there’s always a chance that we see something so interesting that our preferences shift. Also those preferences change over time. So you could do most of the pre-filtering beforehand, except that VCs aren’t upfront about what to filter based on.