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Deal Review Playbook

In venture capital (VC), a deal refers to an investment opportunity in a startup or early-stage company that has the potential for high growth and returns. A deal can involve providing funding in exchange for equity in the company, or it may involve other types of investments such as convertible notes or debt.

Dealflow, on the other hand, refers to the process of sourcing and evaluating potential investment opportunities. It involves the identification of potential startups, the screening of their business plans and financials, and the assessment of their potential for growth and profitability. Dealflow is a critical part of the VC process as it helps investors identify the most promising investment opportunities and make informed investment decisions.

“10x.pub IRG(Investment Research Guild)” is a panel of investors sharing insights and discussing venture deals. “On-call” is the organizer of our deal review in a rotation of one person per week. This article describes how on-call builds and organizes our deal flow.

On-call collects and filters deals​

We keep a record of the deal flow. This is because it takes years to build a business - the median number is 11 years for SaaS companies to go from zero to IPO. In addition, we do not always get investor updates. Thus it is crucial to keep track of the deal flow so that we can return to it later and reflect on ourselves with historical data.

Here is how our on-call collects data every week,

  1. Upload all deals. From Monday to Friday, on-call sources deals and uploads the investment memo and pitch deck onto our shared folder. We do not filter out deals at this step.

  2. Normalize data.

    On-call screens those deals from last Saturday to this Friday.

    1. check if we have reviewed the deal before
    2. filter out ones matching any of these criteria
      1. Locations from the middle east and Africa
      2. Industries among biotech, nuclear energy, and gambling
    3. put candidate deals onto our data tables with these fields: company name, screener, industry, website, pitch, round, raises, pre-money, post-money, ARR, and date

On-call moderates discussions​

On-call will host our weekly meeting as well.

  • 40 min for Deals Review
  • 20 min for Reading Group

On-call updates our knowledge base​

After the discussion, the on-call summarizes the reading materials into our shared knowledge base hosted at http://10x.pub.