How should an investment committee be structured to make better decisions?

Martin Casado · Dec 5, 2022

Hard investment decisions require vigorous debate sustained over days, weeks or months; without that extended exploration you are just being reactive

Massively complicated, under-determined systems with many variables have no systematic decision procedure, so only prolonged debate surfaces an even view

33:28 20VC: a16z's Martin Casado on How the Venture Model is Broken, Why VCs Should Be Running Wall St, Who Wins and Who Loses in the Next Generation of Venture & Investing Lessons from Marc Andreesen, Ben Horowitz and Chris Dixon

Ophelia Brown · Mar 17, 2023

Investment decisions should be made through iterative debate rather than a single pitch meeting, with partners free to hold a lone conviction — and once the decision is made, disagree-and-commit is the right posture

Early-stage investing requires believing something others don't, so partners need a forum to say 'I see that you don't see it but I strongly do'; and since the whole partnership supports each company in a 15-20 company portfolio, everyone must be committed once invested

Scope: Blossom has no formal investment committee

31:26 20VC: Why Growth Investors Ruined the Venture Market, Why Marketing in Venture Has No Substance, Why Follow-On Investing Can Damage Returns and The Mistakes VCs Made in the Last 18 Months with Ophelia Brown, Founder @ Blossom Capital

Frank Rotman · Aug 26, 2021

Being a good investor starts with clarity of thinking — knowing exactly why you made each decision so you would give the same answer years later — because without it you cannot study outcomes and fine-tune your own decision-making process

Consistent answers over time prove the decision had underlying logic; that anchor lets you use frameworks, review outcomes, see where you were right or wrong, and check your risk distribution

39:58 20VC: Has Price Discipline Disappeared? Is it Possible to Build Ownership Over Time? Why Venture Is Less Collaborative Now Than Ever? How fast Do Breakout Companies Become Obvious? How To Construct an Optimised and Repeatable Investment Decision-Making Pr

Taavet Hinrikus · Apr 28, 2025 · hedged

Keeping directional notes on IC discussions is valuable because it helps calibrate judgment, ideally by revisiting the IC a year later to see what was learned

A historical record helps the partnership calibrate its picking and thinking over time

Scope: notes only, not a formal scoring or voting mechanism

30:50 20VC: VCs are Spreadsheet Monkeys and are Commoditised | Why Fees and Carry Misalign GPs and LPs | Why Founders Will Realise Multi-Stage Funds Damage Seed Rounds | Why We Need European Sovereignty More Than Ever with Taavet Hinrikus

Martín Escobari · Nov 11, 2022

Investment committees work better when partners come not to sell the deal but to surface the two or three things keeping them up at night, under a culture of extreme transparency and shared compensation

Shared carry across the whole firm and standardized memos remove the incentive to advocate rather than decide together

28:32 Partners surface worries not sell the deal under shared carry and transparency

Martín Escobari · Nov 11, 2022

Junior investors should lead with their own conclusion rather than just crunching data for someone else to decide, and should try to predict how the investment committee will vote and what they will ask

Forming your own opinion and then modelling the reasoning of people you respect is how judgment compounds

29:48 Junior investors should form own conclusion and anticipate committee reasoning

Kyle Harrison · Oct 21, 2022

Venture is a craft meant to be studied — every firm should apply a deliberate psychology and postmortem practice to its own decisions

Treating your effort as something to be studied and learned from, good and bad, is how you improve

7:51 Firms should apply deliberate psychology and postmortem study to their own decisions

Julien Bek · Aug 24, 2026

Combining a live investment committee with asynchronous written contributions produces better decisions than the IC format alone

An IC is a great format for fast thinking while writing asynchronously is great for slow thinking; the live format is sequential, whereas in a document everyone contributes and the partnership reaches a decision together

25:09 Combine live fast thinking with async written slow thinking

Harry Stebbings · Mar 10, 2025 · hedged

Requiring unanimous partnership decisions on initial checks is a strange way to run a venture firm, even though it clearly works for Emergence

72:21 Unanimous consent on initial checks is unusual but effective