How Do VCs Analyze Companies?
One of the main challenges I have faced working in venture capital is to find a consistent structured way of analyzing companies. The main goals in this analysis are comprehensiveness of the analysis, ease of replication across sectors and like startups, developing a minimally viable analysis for a first pass that can also serve as the foundation of a deeper analysis as an opportunity warrants.
Over the past 18 months, I’ve read tens of business books on strategy, business models, and analytical frameworks. And over the weekend, I read one particularly insightful book that put a capstone on my preferred collection of analyses: Business Model Generation. The book is crowdsourced from a collection of over 1,000 authors and provides a flexible framework for brainstorming, analyzing and comparing business models. It’s an invaluable resource to any entrepreneur and VC.