Open source investment memos

A company we invested in is announcing both their Seed and Series A tomorrow, and I’m about to Open Source my investment memo.  We are far from the first to do this, but I have to admit, every time I’ve seen it, I’ve thought: big deal.  But I have to tell you I’m nervous af.

VCs kind of get by on the opacity of the process. Normally, if we make the right decision for the wrong reason, you’ll never know. If we make a bad decision that was obvious in hindsight, you’ll never see precisely what we missed.

But I think I’d like to publish as many of these as possible anyway, when and as permitted by the founders, trying not to filter them or publish only when the company is successful.  I mean, GitHub has tk/tcl code I wrote in 2007, so this can’t be more embarrassing than that?

It’s hard to describe what my decision-making process is, and maybe this helps with that. Maybe it’s generalizable to how other seed investors make decisions. I’m not sure.  In general, we need more people to have access to VC, to understand the game. Maybe this helps a tiny bit.

Here's a link to where we're keeping them all: https://github.com/rootvc/investment-memos

And if this experiment doesn’t work out, there’s always git filter-keys...

(From this Twitter thread.)