Investing

Investing

Being an investor sounds super sexy. It’s really hard to make money.

What isn’t talked about is that investors don’t have a clue what they’re doing, but they can’t talk about it. The whole thing is about keeping up appearances.

Blogs to read

Here are a bunch of blogs to help you not repeat the mistakes of others.

Angel investing

Some tips from angel investors about, unsurprisingly, investing at the angel stage.

11 Angel investor learnings

7 Things Thomas Korte (AngelPad) Learned At Google And Every Startup Should Copy

ANGEL ADVICE: Suggestions for Angel Investors – by Brad Feld

Angel investing guide to startup investing

How to be a startup angel investor presentation

VC investing

Venture Capital Pitch Deck What VCs raised with to get capital to invest in startups

A reputation comes at a cost, and should

Ten Attributes of Great Fundamental Investors

The Top 8 Mistakes Jason Lemkin Made In His First 18 Months As a VC Partner

Venture capital learnings: 23 Things I’ve Learned as a VC

Venture capital LP one pager for fundraising from Limited Partners

Why we invested. Venture capital firms share why they backed startups

Why founders hate VC rejection emails

Investment thesis

If you’re going to blow a load of other people’s money, hopefully, you have a plan to spend it. This can be formalised in what is termed an “investment thesis”. Funny fact, hardly any investors have one, let alone something particularly smart. The norm seems to be “we’ll invest in cool stuff“. Now there is some logic to this, and one can question if it is the job for investors to define the future of innovation? But, you can write some smart stuff in the meantime. Most just don’t bother.

Here is a collection I made of VC investment thesis’.

Investment Thesis Collection from Venture Capital Firms

You can zero into one as you like by clickity clicking.

Investment memo

Why did VCs invest in a startup? Everyone, well nerds anyway, would like to know why.  Here’s why. I’ve pulled together a list of investment memos VCs have shared.

Here’s an example of a memo template.

Startup investment memo template. How one VC looks at deals

Here is a collection of investment memos.

Venture Capital Investment Memo Collection

You can zero in to each of the memos here.

VC pitch deck

VC decks rarely get shared. Here are some.

Day One Ventures Pitch Deck to Raise a $20m Series A

Work Life Pitch Deck to Raise a $5m Seed

Moonfire Ventures pitch deck to raise $60m Seed round

Rocket Internet pitch deck to raise growth capital investment

Value add

VCs bang on about “value add”. Do you really add value?

Being a helpful VC and achieving your goals

AA 007: In what ways can Angel and Seed Investors have an impact in their portfolio companies and add value other than writing cheques?

HQQA016 What value, besides capital, would you hope to see our firm provide your startup?

Learnings

A few pointers.

Private Airbnb email on how a VC missed out on a unicorn

How VCs can reject founders and have them still like you

How venture capitalists can improve qualified inbound deal flow from startups

Analysis

Some things I wrote ages ago at conferences, or old ass reports.

e-conomy: Unlocking the $200 billion digital opportunity in Southeast Asia

Founder Control and Value Creation in Startups don’t seem to be the same thing

Is ASEAN at an inflection point for eCommerce? UBS ecommerce analysis broker note

Venture Capital Disrupts Itself: Breaking the Concentration Curse – Cambridge Associates

The Venture Capital Opportunity in South East Asia

Raising funds from LPs

Here is a template one-pager for VCs to raise during the first stage of outreach.

Venture capital Indication of Interest template to raise from Limited Partners