Investment Memos are Broken

Well, at least ours was.

We published my startup assessment template a long time ago and have to admit, as a decision making tool for live deals, it’s broken. Deals are usually debated via email, chat and verbally in partnership meetings, and memos can’t keep up.

At LionBird we’ve set up a homemade system for investment scoring that is light enough to be done prior to decision making, takes inputs from the whole team and covers the most salient points of investment.

LionBird Scoring Template

This version is geared towards the fundamentals of early-stage, pre-traction investing with a focus on: the team, market, strategy, and “intangibles”. We find this helps us to contextualize opportunity cost and to focus on the fundamentals of an opportunity, rather than who else is investing or what kind of valuation we’re getting.

Making investment scoring useful but practical is always a challenge, and we’ll continue to tweak this going forward.