Burn the Haystack: Understanding the Investor Mindset
Part 1: Why Investors Think the Way They Do, and Why It’s Rational
The Burned Haystack Dating Method was created by Dr. Jennie Young, professor of writing and rhetoric at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. This series is not affiliated with or endorsed by Dr. Young or the Burned Haystack Dating Method. It is an independent application of applied rhetoric and critical discourse analysis to founder-investor dynamics, with full credit to her original work.
Have you heard of the Burned Haystack Dating Method?
If not, let me give you a quick overview:
It’s a methodology for women on dating apps, created because women are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of outreach they receive on apps – most of it from people that are completely wasting their time. Why? Because so much of the outreach falls into the following categories:
They never even bothered to read a profile and just were swiping for numbers
They’re not serious about dating
They are, in fact, not quality individuals worth wasting our time on
For as long as women can remember, we’ve been told to “give him a chance, you never know”, but the problem is we just don’t have time to do that with the volume of crap coming our way.
So, the question Dr. Jennie Young asked was, “If you want to find the needle in the haystack, what do you do?”
The answer, “You burn the haystack down.”
This movement, started by Dr. Young in a Facebook group, grew into a Substack with tens of thousands of subscribers, then got picked up by Rolling Stone and the New York Times Magazine, and is now a book from HarperCollins published just this April. The methodology is grounded in applied rhetoric and critical discourse analysis, which is the academic practice of decoding what people are actually communicating beneath what they appear to be saying. Dr. Young applied that framework to dating apps and built a system around this cliche about finding a needle in a haystack.
She defines what to look out for, and then also explains how you have to be ruthless in your rejections. “Block to burn”. If they didn’t come with their A-game in the first place, you’re justified in moving on and never looking at their profile ever again.
And you’re probably wondering at this point why the heck I would bring this up at all, right?
Well, a couple of months ago I was driving back from a MedTech conference and Burn the Haystack popped up in my audiobook queue. I’d added it based on someone’s recommendation and didn’t know anything about it except that it was a new hot dating advice book.
Yes, I’m single. No, I don’t think I necessarily needed any of the advice. But I did find her analysis really interesting because it was a way to give definition to women’s intuition on why they got the “ick” from certain dating profiles or conversations even if they couldn’t put words to why they felt that way.
Additionally, I realized there are massive parallels to how investors feel as they are getting constantly bombarded with outreach from founders.
Investors are Women?
Yes, in this scenario the investors are the women.
When I had my startup, I used to tell my co-founder that fundraising was like dating. Back then I cast the startup as the girl, in retrospect that framing was maybe off. In this inundation dynamic with hundreds of cold pitches a week hitting investor inboxes the investor is drowning in options. They are the woman on the app sorting through messages. The entrepreneurs are the ones trying to get noticed. The mentality of the investor is very much like a woman searching for her needle in a haystack.
At conferences I often watch investors from afar - they’ve already got enough people trying to vie for their attention – and its painful to watch. Just a constant stream of pitches and the investors squirming to get away. On top of that, they’re getting daily cold inbound emails and LinkedIn messages by founders. Warm intros from other founders, advisors, lawyers, and bankers. Pitches that don’t fit the thesis, pitches that fit on paper but not in practice, pitches that fit perfectly but arrive a week after the fund closed a similar deal. Conferences where they have back-to-back meetings booked weeks in advance and a line of people waiting to corner them in the hallway between sessions.
So what do they start doing? They burn the haystack down.
They build a filter, trust it, and then only move forward with the small number of conversations that survive it.
I used to be a founder and was also cranky about the fact that investors didn’t give good feedback, misunderstood what I was trying to communicate, and generally didn’t seem to have time for anyone they didn’t already know. But once you see it from their perspective it becomes a way to learn and adapt.
This three part series is to help founders learn and adapt.
Some details on the parallels
Investors have set criteria. Young coaches women to be clear about their dealbreakers and standards before they ever pick up the app. Most women don’t put those criteria in their profile, because there’s a real social cost to being the woman who comes across as listing demands. Investors do not have that problem. They publish their thesis, their stage, their check size, their geography, and sometimes their explicit anti-thesis on their website. The information is sitting there. The founder who pitches a Series A fund at pre-seed, or pitches a digital health generalist on a pure hardware play, or pitches a US-only fund from outside the US, is not failing because the investor is being unreasonable. They are failing because they did not read the criteria the investor was kind enough to put right in front of them.
They only engage with messages that show real effort. Young’s rule for women is to only respond to messages that are well-written, reference the woman’s actual profile, and move the conversation somewhere. Generic “hey gorgeous” gets blocked. The investor version is identical. The cold email that opens with “I came across your fund” and then describes the founder’s company in the same generic language they used in the last forty emails goes unanswered.
Block to Burn is exactly what it sounds like. When you do not hear back after the third follow-up, that is not necessarily rudeness, even if it feels lousy. Mechanically, it is the investor protecting their own attention from being recycled back to a prospect they have already filtered out.
There’s also a whole area of thought in the Burned Haystack community around whether or not you give feedback to the men you’re filtering out.
In the dating world, it looks like this. A woman thinks she’s being helpful by telling a guy why she’s not interested or why his profile didn’t land. The feedback almost never goes well. He brushes it off, argues that she got it wrong, explains why his approach actually is correct, and extends a conversation that is useful to no one. She has already moved on. He is using her time to defend himself instead of hearing what she said.
Even though many founders are reflective and professional and would genuinely benefit from understanding why they got passed on, they’re still often defensive, have follow up questions, or feel this is an opportunity to argue their way back in when the investor has moved on.
So, even constructive feedback creates more work for the investor than they have the time or desire to bother with. If they give you feedback, your reasonable response is “great, if I address these things, will you take another look?” Now they owe you a re-evaluation, a follow-up meeting, and a second decision, across the dozens of founders who would all reasonably ask the same thing.
So, I ask any founder feeling personally rejected by investor silence, how many outreach messages do you get every day from service providers trying to sell you something on LinkedIn? Recruiters, consultants, agencies, software vendors, fundraising coaches. Do you respond to every one with thoughtful feedback on why you’re not interested? Or do you delete them, ignore them, and move on with your actual work? Investors are doing the same thing you do. The lack of response is not personal. It is operational.
Also, special shout-out to COCOstudio. Its been a fun collab creating the images for this series.
In Conclusion
I know this article is a bit different from my usual stuff, but I have been having fun thinking about these parallels and I know I have tons of MedTech, wearable, and AI company founders who tune in somewhat regularly. Hopefully this series can be helpful to them and at least entertaining to the rest of the readers.
This week we laid out the premise, but next week should be even more fun!
We get into the second half of Young’s framework, which is the rhetoric. The named patterns she sees in male dating profiles that signal something disqualifying underneath. So, I’ve interviewed multiple investors to figure out when pitches and founders have given them the “ick”- so that you can learn here instead of getting personalized feedback from each of them.
And the week after, something different.
The reader who finishes the second piece and thinks they have the whole playbook will be missing the bigger move. Stay tuned…
Blythe Karow is a strategic management consultant and founder of The Karow Advisory Group. The insights shared here reflect Blythe’s strategic expertise navigating the complex world of MedTech and wearables. Imagine what that same thinking could uncover when applied to your business.
How Blythe can help:
Commercialization & Market Readiness Reviews
Product & Business Strategy
U.S. Market Entry Planning & Education
Strategic Advisory for MedTech, Wearables, and HealthTech
Footnotes
[1] Young, Jennie. Burn the Haystack: Decode Dating, Torch the Duds, and Make Room for Men Who Matter. HarperCollins, April 2026. https://www.jennieyoung.com/burn-the-haystack-book
[2] Coverage of the Burned Haystack Dating Method including the ten-rule framework and the “Block to Burn” mechanic appears in: Rolling Stone, “Dating App Hack: How a Professor Developed the ‘Burned Haystack’ Method,” October 2024. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/dating-app-hack-burned-haystack-1235136599/