Intuition is like an LLM. Who trained yours?

EDITION Nº 08 · THINK · 9 MIN READ

Plenty of talented women managing other people’s money. Refreshing!

Between sessions, I sat down with Marina Davidova.

We talked about the AI gender gap from Edition 1, women and men at events and as founders, teaching kids agency, and female quotas.

Here is our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.

Eugenia: You invest in startups at an early stage, when there is barely anything to measure. People keep asking you how you use intuition. What is it, for you?

Marina: For me, intuition is actually like an LLM. There's pre-training: all the data you load it with. And you are the one responsible for that data - how much you've read on a topic, and how you processed it. There are repeating patterns, sure. But if you don't observe, and don't reflect properly, your dataset is full of noise. It's not cleaned. It's poor quality.

The second part is removing the noise: illusions, fears, doubts. At the intuitive level we often go, "I don't feel like it." Often that isn't because something is wrong. It's because something got triggered in you. So you have to ask: is this mine? If it's mine, it has to be cleared. Meditation helps me there. Afterwards my mind is at its clearest.

So you are responsible for the pre-training, and in the moment you are responsible for the inference not glitching. Do both, and you can rely on your intuition. Do neither, and the output will be as bad as the input.

Eugenia: So when people say women have better intuition - is that real, or a cliché?

Marina: I think it's real. I don't like splitting things by gender, but as women we've always had to multitask, and we've always had to read the room. We are not the strongest, we're not the fastest. In a conflict we won't win by force and we won't outrun anyone. But we can prevent it, if we catch the smallest signals early and adjust our tone. Everything about risk is about observation.

So our dataset has an extra layer. Not only what we read and hear, but how people react. And our teenage years were brilliant training. She rolled her eyes - what does that mean?

Eugenia: Your daughter wants to study medicine. If she came to you and said, "Mum, I want to invest too" - knowing how male tech and VC still are - what would you tell her?

Marina: It's hard to imagine. Everything in her is anything but tech. She lives in the Silicon Valley, so for her it's anything but programmers and engineers. But I'm an investor. Picturing a pre-seed idea 5 years out is my job, so let's imagine it.

The world has to change, and it would be wonderful if more girls wanted to go into investing.

Eugenia: In my first edition I gave Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT the same money question and changed one word: man or woman. The advice changed. More caution and more saving for her, a riskier strategy for him. We had a gender pay gap. Are we now building a gender AI gap?

Marina: AI doesn't bring anything new. It's a mirror of the existing world, so it's hard to blame the model. We have to change the world, gradually. And it's our responsibility too: to teach people how AI works, how to neutralise exactly these effects, and how to train your own AI to be more competent - even though it really does reflect all of our human foolishness.

So don't hand the responsibility to the AI. Take more agency yourself.

Eugenia: Critical thinking, judgment, agency. How do you teach that to children?

Marina: Here's what frightens me. At their age we were optimistic about the future - flights to the Moon, robots, curing diseases - even while we grew up through perestroika and chaos. We felt we could shape that future. This generation doesn't seem to. They don't know what to study, or whether studying will matter at all.

When I ask myself what I can actually teach my children, I honestly don't know anything except a sense of agency. Everything will change. But if you feel you are the person responsible, and that you can make a choice, you'll manage.

A friend told me yesterday: "People ask me for advice, but I don't have experience." I said: nobody does. Experience is an action plus the time it takes to see the result.

Eugenia: When I speak to an all-women audience, I feel a completely different energy. At a mixed conference I have to pass face control first: prove I'm smart, not only pretty. With women, it's as if I'm valid by default. What's it like for you?

Marina: On the one hand, I'm against separating. We lock ourselves into a little pen. On the other hand, at mixed events people come up to me and I can't tell what they're interested in — the business, or something else. I'm spending energy working that out.

Nick once came with me to a women's event - three men among about 150 women. He said, "Now I understand how you feel." I told him: you don't. You were among 150 lovely women who pose no threat to you. In Boston I was at a conference with 500 men, most of them much older, who first took me for an assistant. Then they saw my badge and started pitching me every two minutes.

Eugenia: Founder trauma. I suffered, so you suffer too.

Marina: Yes. But there are women who give back. Vanessa Parli, at Stanford's Human-Centered AI institute, was told again and again that it wasn't her place. When she started computer science at Stanford, a guy came up and told her she must be in the wrong room. She said, "No, I'm in my place." She has a very soft, quiet voice. She's now a director. She kept taking on more responsibility, and kept saying "this is my place."

I invited her to speak at our TEDx The Woman’s Voice because it matters. People around you can say anything. What do you think? Plenty of girls would have said, "Maybe it really isn't for me." When someone tells you this isn't your place, ask: then where is my place? If you can't see yourself anywhere else, that's your place, and you fight for it.

Eugenia: Listening is a skill too, though. Knowing whose opinion to weigh, and when.

Marina: You can listen to anything. But the main thing to listen to is yourself. If everyone says one thing and you feel another, and the contradiction is strong — listen to yourself.

Eugenia: So many founders build from trauma, to prove something - to a parent, to someone from their childhood. Do you see them growing over it with time?

Marina: I've seen strong transformations. You can build a lot on pain. But there's always a powder keg: either you break, or the pain gets lived through.

The problem is when it shows up as suffering and eats your energy. Once you've lived it through, so much energy is freed up - not for pain, but for creating.

Marina: At our conference I moderated a session on how people will live in an AGI world. It's not that far off, and it will be hard. We'll move from human doing to human being. We won't need to work as much to live decently, and we don't know how to live like that. For millennia, when someone asked "who are you?", we answered with our profession. Finding meaning beyond work will be the main task.

Eugenia: This is probably a little easier for women?

Marina: Yes! When I meditate with men, I see the same thing every time: their biggest ego attachment is work. So when work fails, it's a catastrophe - they lose most of their identity. For women, the roles tend to be more equal: mother, partner, professional. Losing one can be hard and painful, but it's rarely destructive.

I picture a tree with one huge branch. Saw it off and the whole crown comes with it.

Eugenia: But does having many roles mean women under-focus, and achieve less than a man who puts everything into one branch?

Marina: If you prune a tree in spring so it grows into one branch, yes, you get more focus there. But you are allowed to choose. Cut the branches you don't need. Keep as many as you need - never mind what anyone else says. You're the gardener. They are observers.

What tree do you want in your garden? Of course, if you never cut a single branch, you end up with a little bush with a million twigs, and it never grows tall, because the energy goes everywhere at once. Beyond that, it's personal. There is nothing greater than the freedom of choice we have.

Eugenia: And the responsibility.

Marina: For that freedom, yes.

Eugenia: Is that why there are fewer women founders? Men go all in on one branch?

Marina: Maybe.

A boy runs, falls, and hears "well done, keep going."

And it's not about nationality or culture. It works like this in America, in Europe, in the post-Soviet world. Maybe Scandinavia is different, I can't say. I'm not sure it's changing. It's so subconscious.

Eugenia: Do you believe in positive discrimination for women? Quotas?

Marina: I'd say yes. The pendulum for women has to swing the other way - maybe even overshoot - so that it can rebalance later. We are not in the middle yet, but we are on our way.

It was a great conversation. But an action you can take out of it, is even better. Here's how I would turn Marina's model into practice:

Know someone this would help? Forward it, or send her the sign-up link.

With love and curiosity,
Eugenia

I am not a financial advisor. I am doing my diligence in public and sharing my experience with you - but I also trust you to build and make your own.

Previous editions and more - on our website.