Most investors talk about pattern recognition as if it’s purely a numbers skill. Adrian Vanzyl sees it differently. Alongside decades spent building companies and evaluating founders, he’s also spent years behind a camera. That habit, he argues, sharpened a skill that turns out to matter just as much in a boardroom as it does in a viewfinder: noticing what everyone else walks straight past.
This isn’t a stretch metaphor. Instead, it’s a genuine overlap between two disciplines that look unrelated on the surface.
Why Photography Trains You to Slow Down
A camera forces a specific kind of attention. You can’t photograph everything in a scene at once. As a result, you have to choose. What’s the actual subject? What’s just noise in the frame? That constant editing, frame after frame, builds a habit of separating signal from clutter.
Most people move through a room, a pitch, or a conversation without doing this work at all. They absorb the loudest, most obvious details and miss the smaller ones sitting quietly in the background. Photography punishes that kind of inattention immediately. A photo either captures the real subject, or it doesn’t.
How This Skill Shows Up in a Pitch Meeting
Adrian Vanzyl applies a similar discipline when he’s in the room with a founder. The pitch deck is the obvious subject. However, it’s rarely the most revealing one. A hesitation before answering a hard question. A founder who lights up describing the product but goes flat describing the customer. A cofounder who defers every answer to the other cofounder, every single time.
None of these details show up in a financial model. Yet they’re often more predictive than anything in the spreadsheet. Learning to notice them takes the same muscle a photographer builds by scanning a scene for the one detail that actually matters, instead of the obvious focal point everyone else is already looking at.
The Discipline of Composing Rather Than Capturing
Good photography isn’t about capturing more. It’s about composing deliberately. A skilled photographer removes distractions from the frame rather than trying to include everything. That same instinct applies directly to evaluating a business.
Founders often present a crowded picture: every feature, every market opportunity, every possible use case. The instinct to include everything is understandable. It’s also usually a mistake. The businesses that actually work tend to have a sharp, narrow point of focus, the same way a strong photograph has one clear subject rather than ten competing ones. Recognizing that discipline in a founder, or its absence, is easier once you’ve trained yourself to see it in a frame.
Why Patience Matters More Than Speed
Photography also teaches something venture investing constantly tempts people to forget: patience beats speed most of the time. A rushed photographer settles for the first decent shot. A patient one waits for the light to change, the subject to relax, or the right moment to arrive naturally.
The same principle applies to due diligence. Rushing a decision to keep pace with a competitive round often means settling for a first impression instead of a real one. Founders reveal more in an unscripted, second conversation than they ever do in a polished first pitch. Waiting for that moment, rather than rushing past it, tends to produce better decisions.
What Creative Habits Do for Analytical Work
There’s a common assumption that creative pursuits and analytical work pull in opposite directions, and that time spent on one comes at the expense of the other. In practice, the relationship often runs the other way. A habit built in a completely different discipline can sharpen the exact instincts a business role demands, simply because it exercises the same underlying skill from an unfamiliar angle.
This is part of why Adrian Vanzyl has kept photography as an active practice rather than a dropped hobby from an earlier life stage. It’s not a break from the analytical work. It’s training for it, just wearing a different name.
The Practical Takeaway for Founders and Investors
For anyone in an evaluative role – investing, hiring, or simply trying to make better decisions under uncertainty – the lesson here isn’t literally to pick up a camera. Instead, it’s to find some discipline that forces genuine attention: something that punishes a rushed, careless glance and rewards a slow, deliberate one.
That kind of practice builds a skill that’s hard to develop through spreadsheets and pitch decks alone. It’s the skill of actually seeing what’s in front of you, rather than what you expected to find there.
