Tldr; Collection of VC investment thesis that has been made public
The VC world is murky. The innards rarely see light. I just had an advisory call with some chaps setting up a fund and they asked about fund structuring (not the first time). When I mentioned ‘This is not something you can Google.’ They laughed and said ‘yeah, we know!’ Every time I have a beer with a VC friend and chat about their fund structure the pattern is pretty much ‘It depends on where your LPs are, it’s complicated, talk to a lawyer.‘
The startup funding process used to be as opaque, but in the early 2000s bloggers such as Venture Hacks, Fred Wilson and the like started explaining everything including term sheets.
The VC/LP world has not taken to sharing with the other kids in the sandbox. Indeed, there are very few blogs from LPs. Chris Douvos’s is the only one I have found as of yet. He is very eloquent and I highly recommend reading it.
In an attempt to better understand VCs, I set out to read their investment thesis’ in 2015. One would think this would be the most basic thing.
VCs expect every founder reaching out to them to understand what they invest in, so surely they would do the service of spelling it out? Providing a veneer of academic rigour can easily be illustrated by displaying their investment thesis. Only, you would be wrong.
Having scoured the internet I have only been able to accumulate a handful. If I had this problem, I felt others no doubt would too. So like the VC pitch deck collection and startup pitch deck collection, I created one for VC investment thesis’.
If you have one to share, kindly email me and I’ll add it. Cheers.
Related reading
- Investment Memos for VC Interviews
- Thesis-driven early-stage Investing
- 16 mobile theses by Benedict Evans at a16z
- Stay In Your Overlaps
- Venture Capital Disintermediation is Coming
- HaaS – An Investment Thesis for Hardware Startups
- Investment Thesis Fundamentals by Dave McClure
- A VC explains VC’s “Investment Thesis” video from Scale Venture Partners
- Technology Waves and the Hypernet
- Notes On Early Stage Technology Investing; Art, Science, or Both?
- Building A Venture Capital Firm Is A Marathon, Not A Sprint by Sapphire Ventures
- Venture Funds as Products. What We Changed for Homebrew III. There are a bunch of interesting insights in this
- In Search of Narrative Violations by Bedrock Capital. The best time to invest in a company is when it’s most in violation of a popular narrative.
- A list of 17 one page thesis’ Turner’s Fantasy VC Portfolio II “I picked 17 companies accompanied with a one-page thesis for each“. On startups, but related
- The Merits of Bottoms Up Investing – Very thoughtful blog on the different ways investors look at opportunities by Brett Bivens
Comments 6
Hi I cant find the collection of thesis
Author
Shubham- sorry. Got a new developer who messed about with js settings and he broke the system. I figured out what he did. It works now.
Hi, I am currently unable to locate where is the thesis collection. It does not state a ” click here for it” or any hyperlink for it
Author
Sangreal-
The 33 links load as images through a JS plugin I bought which lazy loads. You just click on the images. There should be no issues unless you have some cache/plugin issue.
I hired a dev to help me improve the UI of my site for resource collections so hope to change all resource pages asap so the experience is better across the board.
ADJ
Anything on fintech (esp insurance)?
Author
Hey Adit-
TBH, there are only 33 I can find which is pathetic. I mean there are some about pages with 20 words, but that’s a joke right?
The reasons there aren’t more are multi-fold, but I will reduce to two:
1/ VCs have no reason to share publicly
2/ They are hard to write (So why share when you are embarrassed?)
I don’t have filters because there aren’t enough shared. Duh…
I can give you advice though to approach your own.
STORY SECTION
1/ Start with the insurance industry -What’s going on?
2/ What are the big issues you see? Structurally, why are there problems?
3/ Why are the problems not being solved by incumbents?
4/ Directionally, why are people reviewing “insurance” differently. How are attitudes changing?
5/ Summarise the key areas of opportunity
6/ Team
EXECUTION SECTION
7+/ Track record… team, value add, deal sourcing, fund terms…. bla
Explain your specific thesis. Larger LPS are looking for specific exposure. Be logical.
I have private VC decks, but yours will still be different and there isn’t that much to learn from others. I have a good one which really focuses on the history the two parters have, but that’s super specific to them. Right?
ADJ