Investors probably shouldn't be chucking $100m+ at startups without doing the bare minimum of DD if that's the point of contention here...

You can't pin it on investors, when founders deliberately schedule fundraising rounds tightly not to give investors time to think. This benefits the founder, but if they pull a fast one, investors will lose trust and be less lenient towards the next founder. Trust is a pillar of the venture capital ecosystem.

Don't say buyer beware.

Or:

"those who can, do; those who can't, teach"

Is this a quote from somewhere or something you just made up? Either way, I like it.

CTRL+F "$25 billion":

“I can’t justify it,” said Anup Srivastava, an assistant professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. “Facebook is a great business, but it’s worth around $25 billion.”

So can you make the first page of the survey a request for an email address, which you send a verification email to. They enter their email address, you send them an email with some sort of uid in the url, they then click that link to continue with the survey.

Obviously, you'd need to log the email address to make sure you only send one email to each address, but that should be the only thing you'd need to keep a record of.

This would seem to provide enough verification of individuals, without too much assing about on the end user side.