Precursor VenturesA classic pre-seed and seed stage venture capital firm

Is memory a reliable tool for investors?

29 Jun 2025 · 1 min

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A short transcript excerpt from a Precursor Ventures YouTube video arguing that memory is unreliable for tracking past investment judgments. The speaker says hindsight bias clouds recollection of how positively they viewed companies at the time of investment and describes a practice of capturing real-time notes about founder impressions and expected outcomes, then periodically updating those notes.

Chapters

He said, basically, memory is a crappy way to try to keep track of things. And I agree with you. The one thing I realized probably a few years ago was people would ask me, what did you think of that company? We invested. Inevitably, I had some rosy, overly optimistic view of how perfect the company was when we invested. And I was like, well, the only way I can think of to solve this hindsight bias is to actually capture your thoughts in the moment. So now we have a whole process of, like, how do we capture at the time of Wire, what do we think is going to happen? We do more as a documentation of what we think about the founders. And I find if you capture that in real time, it's the only way to be honest. Yeah. And. And then periodically, you want to update your thinking. So.