This morning I put 500 fictional venture capitalists in a building.

I broke them into 100 rooms, five people each, and had them argue about a client’s funding strategy. Standard stuff – I run persona work like this on most engagements, whether the question is fundraising, positioning, or go-to-market.

Then I added an open bar.

Tipsy VCs, it turns out, are more useful than sober ones. The sober rooms produced the answers you’d expect: raise a priced seed, here’s your comp table, here’s your dilution. The bar rooms started saying things like “You’re running a restaurant and you’ve never asked what the food costs.” Blunter. Less hedged. Occasionally wrong in interesting ways.

To be clear about what this is: I’m not simulating market feedback, and no fictional VC is going to tell me what a real one will do. What this does is widen the range of angles I have to consider before I am on the call. The unhedged version of an objection is easier to prepare for than the polite one.

The client got better funding options and a cleaner business structure out of it. I credit the bar.