Chapter 4
Evaluating Deals
Now for the craft. Every associate picks these skills up on the job, but there's no reason you can't start now. Sourcing. Reading a pitch deck. Running a first meeting with a founder. Doing real diligence. Writing an investment memo that gets a deal through an IC.
SaaS Metrics for Investors
LTV, CAC, ARR, NRR, Rule of 40. Every SaaS pitch shows up with some version of these numbers, and every set is either clean, messy, or quietly wrong. This module is how to calculate each one, what good vs great looks like at different stages, and how founders inflate these numbers without technically lying. If you work in SaaS-heavy venture, you'll use it most weeks.
Resources coming soon
Reading Pitch Decks Like an Investor
Investors don't read pitch decks the way founders hope. They read them fast, in a specific order, and a lot of decks get a no in the first 60 seconds. This is what experienced investors actually look for. The problem slide, the team slide, the traction slide. The patterns that signal a fast pass. After this you'll have a 10-minute checklist for evaluating a deck that holds up against most real diligence.
Resources coming soon
Sourcing & Deal Flow in Practice
Sourcing is the part of the job least teachable from books and most demanded from junior VCs. So this one is practical. We'll get into how top funds actually find deals, what an outbound thesis is, how inbound triage works at a fund that sees thousands of companies a year, and how to build a sourcing loop from an analyst seat. The tactics here show up in basically every associate interview.
Resources coming soon
First Founder Meetings
A first founder meeting is thirty minutes to decide whether there's a deal here. What you ask, what you listen for, what red flags feel like in real time, how you leave the room with a cleaner read than you walked in with. We'll get into the question patterns top investors use, the mistakes junior VCs reliably make (leading the witness, pitching the founder), and how to take notes that'll actually be useful when you sit down to write this up.
Resources coming soon
Due Diligence in Practice
Diligence eats most of the analyst week. Customer reference calls, financial model review, market research, background checks, cohort analysis. This one walks through each workstream, what good actually looks like in each, and the red flags that kill deals late. You want to find those before the partners commit, not after.
Resources coming soon
The Investment Memo
The memo is the artifact that outlives the deal. It's how the associate's thinking gets reviewed by partners, how the IC makes a decision, and how the firm remembers a year from now what it was thinking. We'll look at real published memos, break down the anatomy section by section, and cover how to write one that actually persuades an IC, not just documents.
Resources coming soon