Diligence.

One memo generator is not enough. The right structure is three memos, each tied to a specific decision point in the diligence process, each calibrated to the amount of data the firm actually has in hand. A memo written before the first call should look nothing like a memo written before an investment committee vote — the second is built on an order of magnitude more information, and it has a different job to do.

Memo 01 — Pre-Meeting Brief

Generated before the partner has met the company. It pulls from public signal and vendor enrichment — website, PitchBook, LinkedIn, press, product traces — and synthesizes a short, scannable synopsis. The goal isn't conviction. The goal is to walk into a 30-minute intro call already smart on the company so the questions are sharp and the partner's time is spent learning what the data can't tell them. This is also where the “Key Questions” section earns its keep: a focused list of what the firm doesn't know yet and needs to find out on the call.

Memo 02 — Investment Committee Brief

Generated after the data room arrives and the first call is done, before the firm commits real diligence time. This is the gut check. We lay it out clean and to the point in bullet-point format — readable in three minutes, designed to surface whether the opportunity is worth a deep dive. The brief is produced once the team has wrapped its head around the company and where it might fit; the question it answers is not “should we invest” but “should we spend the next two weeks treating this like a real deal.”

Memo 03 — Investment Committee Memo

The decision document. Long-form, written in prose — sentences and paragraphs, not bullets — because the conviction it carries needs the room to breathe. It draws on the full depth of resources the firm has assembled: every artifact pulled in during data intake, the full vendor enrichment stack, reference calls, expert conversations, internal research, prior comparable deals from the BEAST. Critically, it marries that material with the human-generated work — the team's thesis, opinions, and judgment — into a single document that the partnership votes on.

Inputs drive outputs

The quality of every memo is directly correlated with the quality of the data you feed it. Data inputs are the most crucial aspect of memo generation — the prompts, the structure, and the workflow are all secondary to having the right material in hand. In the early days of building an AI-native diligence process, that means manually dumping every file, folder, transcript, and artifact you have accumulated into the workflow structure you have built. Over time, as the firm's internal intelligence system matures — the kind described in Blueprint 5 — the right relevant context begins to surface and feed itself directly into each section at runtime, without the manual collation step.

These memos get better over time. The prompts are not static; they are the product of continuous iteration and human evaluation. We have been through, on average, fifty to seventy-five rounds of feedback and revision to arrive at the final prompts we use today. Expect the same at your firm: the first version will be useful, the tenth version will be sharp, and the fiftieth version will feel like a partner wrote it.

Standardize the sections, vary the inputs

The sections stay constant across all three memos. What changes is the depth of information available to fill them. Standardization is what makes the memos comparable across deals, makes them useful as training material for the AI stack, and makes them readable at a glance for partners who see 20 of them a quarter. Adapt the section list to how your firm evaluates companies — the structure below is the one we've landed on:

• Business description & history
  What the company does, how it got here.
• Products overview
  What's been built, how it works, what's next.
• Market, strategy & differentiation
  Where it plays and why it wins.
• Go-to-market & commercial traction
  Pipeline, customers, motion, retention.
• Unit economics & financial profile
  The actual P&L and what it implies.
• Team & leadership
  Founders, key hires, gaps, dynamics.
• Competitive landscape
  Direct, adjacent, emergent — and the firm's view.
• Key questions (Pre-Meeting Brief only)
  What we still don't know — the questions the call needs to answer.

The bar

Every company taken past an intro call gets a Pre-Meeting Brief before that call happens. Every company that clears the brief gets an IC Brief once the data room is in hand. Every company that clears the IC Brief gets a full IC Memo before the partnership votes. Sections stay standardized. The memos write themselves as diligence happens — not after — so what lands in front of partners is always the current state of the firm's understanding, not a last-minute scramble to assemble one.