India, Sept. 26 -- A few days ago, in San Francisco, I listened to early-stage founders compress years of work into three-minute pitches.

I was judging startups at STEP San Francisco. Artificial Intelligence (AI) was, unsurprisingly, everywhere. Yet after several days of conversations with founders and investors, the question I brought home to London was not really about AI.

It was about recognition.

Investors like to describe what they do as pattern recognition. Experience supposedly teaches us what a promising founder, market or company looks like.

There is an obvious problem with this. The better we become at recognising successful patterns from the past, the easier it becomes to overlook something that does not yet resemble them....