Every investment deserves a written memo. Writing forces clear thinking and creates a record for future reference. Use this checklist to structure your memos.
Executive summary (1 paragraph): What does the company do? Why are you investing? How much at what terms?
Company overview (1 page): Problem, solution, product, traction, team. Include GitDealFlow signal screenshot for engineering velocity.
Market (1 page): TAM, SAM, SOM. Market timing. Competitive landscape. Why this company wins.
Founders (1 page): Background, domain expertise, references, commitment. Why this team can win.
Deal terms (1 page): Round size, valuation, your check size, ownership %, pro-rata rights, board seat.
Risks and mitigants (1 page): What could go wrong? How is the team mitigating these risks?
Conclusion: Conviction level (1-10), why you're investing or passing, conditions for follow-on.
A checklist earns its place when every line maps to evidence you can obtain. The items above follow the same public-data discipline behind GitDealFlow: 350+ startup GitHub organizations tracked across 15 sectors, refreshed weekly, with breakouts identified 21 to 47 days before the round. Where a line asks about engineering execution, the evidence is usually public: commit velocity, contributor concentration, and repository expansion, all confirmable from the repository itself rather than from a pitch deck.
A practical read-through of Investment Memo Checklist for Angels and VCs: the dataset behind this page refreshes weekly across 350+ organizations and 15 sectors, and every figure shown traces to a public GitHub REST API pull. That matters for two reasons. Reproducibility: any number here can be re-derived from primary sources, which is the standard the published methodology sets for itself. Timeliness: engineering acceleration precedes announcements, so this page follows the data cadence rather than the news cycle, and the freshness endpoint always reports the exact pull date.
If Investment Memo Checklist for Angels and VCs is your entry point, the fastest next steps are fixed: skim the glossary for the three or four terms that anchor the topic, open the research dataset to see the raw weekly snapshots behind the summary numbers, and run one live query against the free momentum checker with a company you already know well. Seeing the signal fire on a familiar name is the quickest way to judge whether code-side sourcing belongs in your own workflow.
One caveat worth stating plainly on Investment Memo Checklist for Angels and VCs: momentum is a leading indicator, not a verdict. A repository can accelerate for reasons that never become a fundraise, and a quiet quarter does not mean a team is failing. The disciplined use of this page is as one input in a stack, a way to rank where scarce diligence time goes, and a way to notice change early. The methodology page documents every limitation, including the bot filter, the two-period confirmation rule, and the sectors where coverage is thinnest.