How experience shapes startup screening: cognitive strategies of startup accelerator evaluators

Accelerators screen large numbers of early-stage ventures under f uncertainty, limited information, and time pressure. Yet, little is known about how evaluative experience shapes the cognitive processes underlying initial screening decisions. Using Verbal Protocol Analysis (VPA), this exploratory study captures evaluators’ concurrent verbalizations as they assess startup applications, enabling a comparison of how novice and experienced evaluators process information in real time. The findings reveal systematic differences in screening cognition. Experienced evaluators reached decisions more quickly and focused selectively on team quality, market plausibility, and accelerator fit. In contrast, novices engaged more extensively with information explicitly provided in applications, particularly product and financial details. Heuristic reasoning also varied by experience. Experienced evaluators more frequently drew on prior screening cases and domain-specific knowledge, whereas novices relied more heavily on generalized prototypes and personally salient experiences. Overall, the results suggest that evaluative expertise lies less in the quantity of knowledge available to evaluators and more in how information is filtered, prioritized, and interpreted under uncertainty. The study contributes to accelerator selection and experiential learning research by opening the cognitive “black box” of initial screening and highlighting expertise as a context-sensitive process of selective information processing. Practical implications for evaluator development are discussed.