Flying Solo or Hunting in Packs? Understanding the Divergence between Individual and Collective Decisions in Angel Groups

Investing in the earliest stages of a new company is a high-stakes gamble. These are ventures that often have no sales, no profits, and sometimes not even a finished product, only a promise of what they might become. To navigate this uncertainty, wealthy individuals known as business angels provide the initial capital that allows these ideas to take flight. For decades, the image of such an investor was that of a solitary figure, relying on personal intuition, gut feeling, and a deep trust in the people behind the idea to make a decision. However, the landscape of early finance has shifted. Today, these investors increasingly organize themselves into groups, pooling their resources and making decisions together. This move from working alone to working as a team brings a new set of rules to the table. When a group of people must agree on a single course of action, they cannot simply rely on private hunches; they must find reasons that everyone can understand, verify, and defend. This creates a tension between what an individual finds exciting and what a group can justify funding. Understanding how this shift changes the fate of new technologies is crucial, because the decisions made in these early moments determine which innovations reach the market and which disappear into obscurity.

Researchers Andrea Odille Bosio, Vincenzo Capizzi, and Francesca Tenca set out to observe this tension in action. They studied a specific network of business angels in Italy, a large organization where a standing committee of thirty-eight members evaluates hundreds of new business proposals every year. What made this setting unique was the ability to see the exact same proposals through two different lenses. First, every committee member filled out a detailed form to score a new venture independently, before ever speaking to the others. They rated the business on ten different factors, from the strength of the founding team to the originality of the technology, and stated how interested they would be in investing their own money. Only after these private scores were recorded did the group meet to discuss the top candidates and decide collectively which ones to fund. Crucially, the network also allowed members to invest individually in projects that the group had rejected. This created a rare opportunity to compare how the same investors judged the same ideas when acting alone versus when acting as a group.

The study analyzed data from 450 different business proposals evaluated between 2020 and 2025, covering nearly 5,000 individual scoring forms. The results revealed a striking divergence in what mattered most to the investors depending on whether they were deciding alone or together. When evaluating a venture on their own, the committee members were driven primarily by two things: the quality of the founding team and the innovativeness of the solution. They cared deeply about the people and the novelty of the idea, but they paid almost no attention to how clearly the business plan explained the value of the product or how the money would be spent. Their personal interest was a matter of conviction, not a checklist of formal requirements.

However, once the group sat down to make a collective decision, the priorities shifted dramatically. The same investors who had been captivated by raw innovation and strong teams began to penalize the most novel proposals. In the group setting, the clarity of the value proposition became the most important factor, while the sheer innovativeness of the technology became a liability. The group favored ventures that could be easily explained and defended with standard, verifiable evidence, such as a clear business model or a registered patent. The most innovative ideas, which often lack this kind of concrete, codified proof, were systematically passed over. The only element that retained its importance in both settings was the strength of the founding team; the group never lost sight of the people behind the project, even as they lost interest in the most radical technological leaps.

This pattern suggests that the group process acts as a filter that favors what is easily justifiable over what is truly novel. When an individual investor champions a risky, new technology, they can rely on their own experience and intuition. But when a committee must agree, they need reasons that their peers can check and accept. This requirement pushes the group toward criteria that are easy to document and compare, such as financial projections or patents, and away from the intangible qualities that often define breakthrough innovations. The researchers found that this was not simply because the group members disagreed with each other; even when the committee was united, the bias against novelty remained. The group was not avoiding risk because of confusion; they were avoiding it because the most novel ideas were the hardest to defend in a formal meeting.

The study also looked at what happened to the projects the group rejected. A significant number of these were later funded by individual members of the committee who had been convinced by the team's potential during their private review. These "rescued" ventures were often the ones with the strongest founding teams, confirming that individual investors were still willing to back the people they believed in, even when the group said no. The individuals who stepped in to fund these rejected projects tended to be those with more personal wealth and more managerial experience, suggesting that they felt confident enough to act on their own judgment against the group's consensus.

The findings offer a clear picture of how the organization of investment changes the outcome. Professionalizing the process of angel investing, by bringing people together to make decisions, adds rigor and transparency. It ensures that choices are defensible and based on shared evidence. But this comes with a cost: the system naturally filters out the most radical and difficult-to-explain ideas. The group becomes better at selecting well-packaged, lower-risk ventures, but it may miss the very innovations that require the most patience and the most faith in the people behind them. For entrepreneurs, this means that the pitch they need to win over a single investor is different from the pitch needed to win over a committee. For the investors themselves, it highlights a structural tension between the need for collective accountability and the desire to fund the next great breakthrough. The study concludes that while groups are essential for managing risk, the most innovative ventures may need a safety valve—a way for individual conviction to survive the collective filter—to ensure that the most novel technologies still have a chance to succeed.