Venture Capital Investment Memo Reading

If you’re trying to learn about Venture Capital, you will note the conspicuous dearth of learnings shared online from GPs.

VCs prefer to display their acumen through Twitter missives rather than sharing how and why they do their job. And by this, I mean sharing the investment memos they have to write for each and every investment they make.

Don’t get me wrong, there can be good reasons to not do so! But if you’re an emerging manager hoping to learn you don’t want to hear that.

Michael Dempsey tweeted this:

IMO VCs on average don’t share (and you know I’ve tried) because it’s a lot easier/safer to sound smart in 3 talking points than it is in a well reasoned memo that recognizes downside possibility and leaves you vulnerable.

Interestingly Steve Schlafman (Formerly at Primary Venture Partners and RRE) tweeted:

I’m a big believer in letting founders review the investment memo on their company before pitching the partnership. Both sides benefit.

His firm’s investment thesis is not public.

Let’s get to the point though. I managed to curate a modest collection of 38 investment memos. They are shared on a pretty page you either saw already, or likely want to check out sharpish.

This post is a supporting one to keep the collection clean. It’s a list of all the blogs on investment memos I can find to save you time Googling to learn.

Read on.

Reading on Investment Memos

Ping me or share in the comments if you have something to add please to help everyone.

• 50 angel deal memos This is a random one. Muhan Zhang is investing $10k across 50 startups and has written v short memos on each
• Investment memo template by Steve Schlafman
• A Template for Startup Executive Summary or Investment Memo for VCs
• What do we base our investment decisions on? Open source Deal memo Template– Point9 share a template and thoughts on how they make investment decisions
• The Investment Memo by Next View Ventures. Also might find this interesting How a Seed VC Makes Investment Decisions
• What We Talk About When We Talk About Companies by Rob Go at Next View Ventures
• How to Write the Perfect Investment Memo
• Investment Memo by Y-Combinator
• The VC Memo: Lessons For Entrepreneurs
• Startup investment memo by Koor and Associates
• Investment Memos for VC Interviews
• VC 201: The Investment Memo by AWS
• Michael Dempsey Investment Memo Template – September 2019 by Michael Dempsey at Compound
• Thoughts on Investment Memos by Michael Dempsey at Compound
• The Investment Memo by Tim Devane at Inception Capital
• A quick guide to writing an early-stage biotech investment memo
• A Memo About Writing Investment Memos
• How To Underwrite An Industrial Deal & Create Investment Memos Lp’S Love – This is about property not VC, but there are still things to learn. They share their underwriting process. They also have a memo template. Again, not “VC” but worth having a look at.
• Here’s my investment memo template – Michael Dempsey wrote a blog that has some thoughts and a template. I looked at the template and he seems to have not changed settings so random people have killed it with edits

VC Investment Theses

Venture capital investors typically (hopefully) have an investment thesis. It’s what they agree with their limited partners (LPs) as to what they are going to invest in.

You’d think that investors would share these, but well, they don’t often. I’ve collected all the ones I can find here:

INVESTMENT THESIS COLLECTION