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

The Only Memos That Get Shared #venturecapitalnews #podcast #memos

17 Jan 2025 · 1 min

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Short excerpt from a Precursor Ventures YouTube podcast (recorded Jan 17, 2025) in which speakers reflect on venture-capital memos. They observe that publicly shared memos are often only the successful ones ('winner memos'), question the educational value of sharing only polished pitch materials, and express interest in revealing more of their investment thought process while protecting founders' privacy.

Chapters

I've worked at places that had written memos and we've gone back and looked two years later and almost in every case you laugh. Either you laugh because something you thought was definitely going to be true turned out to be totally not true, or something you thought would absolutely not happen ended up happening. And then there's the unknown. I think oftentimes the only memos that get shared are the winner memos. This is the pitch deck of the company that raised in $25 million Series A where this company went public. Here's the really crappy version of the pitch deck they used to raise their seed round and I feel like in some cases those are more about puffing one's ch and showing that we had access to this cool deal or we have foresight than it is about sharing for educational purposes.
It would be really cool to see memos on companies that didn't turn out to be large successes completely unedited, because most of the things that end up happening with the company that made it maybe turn out to not be a success, I doubt were in the memo to begin with.
I'm always thinking, how can we share more of our thought process behind the investments that we're making without sharing more that is appropriate about a team or a set of people that are still finding their way and figuring things out. And we'll probably end the journey as better founders than they began.