Private Venture Investing Dossier PVD-017
An Investment Memo, Annotated
What a good private-market memo actually argues.
A venture memo is not a forecast. It is an argument about uncertainty — and the quality of the memo is the quality of the questions it refuses to dodge.
The only four questions
- Why this team? Founder–market fit is the single most predictive variable and the hardest to fake.
- Why now? What changed in the world that makes the impossible suddenly merely hard?
- Why will it compound? Where does advantage accrue rather than dissipate?
- What has to be true? Stated plainly, so it can be proven wrong.
A memo that cannot be falsified is marketing. A memo that can be is research.
Pricing the unknown
You are not buying the present cash flows. You are buying a distribution of outcomes, most of which are zero, a few of which are everything. Position size is the real thesis.