Deep Dive: Using Mem as a VC

“Venture capitalist”: sounds pretty exciting; what does it actually involve?

Well... kind of. Venture capitalists are investors who provide funding to companies looking to expand or to startups that are trying to get off the ground. From the initial pitch through to vetting, funding, and checking in on how the company is using their investment, VCs are involved every step of the way.

Below I’m going to walk through a typical day in the life of a venture capitalist, and show how you can integrate Mem into you and your team’s workflow to save time, maximize communication, and create a knowledge database that facilitates easy capture, retrieval, and proactive surfacing of information.

In the morning

As a VC, it’s likely that one of the first things you’ll do in the morning is check news outlets – both general and trade – for any relevant updates in your market.

If you see something interesting, you might want to share it with your team for discussion. Use Mem Spotlight (Cmd + Shift + Space on Mac) to quickly capture the article without context-shifting, adding any tags you like and tagging your collaborative Mem workspace to share it with everyone.

You and your team can then add comments and reply to each other using Mem’s Comment function.

If you see a new company that sounds interesting and you want to contact them, you can do a quick search in Mem to see if any of your team have reached out to them already.

If not, add a quick task to your Daily mem to remind yourself to contact them during business hours. You can set up your Daily mem by going to Flows, and then selecting the Daily mem tile. Choose what time you want your mem to appear each day, then customize the template in whatever ways you want. Using a Daily mem consistently is a great way to set your agenda for the day, as well as reminding yourself of any outstanding or ongoing tasks from the day before.

Throughout the day

Most of a VC’s day is spent in meetings and phone calls: listening to company pitches, doing due diligence on potential investments, and following up on investment leads. Mem’s Google Calendar integration lets you see what meetings you have coming up; you can also join them from within the app by hovering over the event and selecting Join call.

Taking effective and easily-retrievable notes is crucial when you’re meeting with people back-to-back. You can do that in Mem simply by hovering over the meeting in the calendar strip at the top of the home page and selecting Create mem for event. This will open a new mem that populates with the Google Calendar event name and a list of all the meeting attendees.

To reduce your time spent on repetitive tasks and to make sure you capture all the important information from a meeting, you can create notes Templates for meetings you participate in frequently. For instance, in pitch meetings, you’ll want to include details like the name of the company, the name of its founder(s), and other key pieces of information to refer back to later. You can do this by heading to Flows, clicking Templates, and then clicking Create new template on the top right of the screen. Customize your template and name it, then hit Create template at the bottom of the screen.

Now, you can access that template from any mem just by typing forward slash (/) followed by the name of the template, and then hitting Enter.

From your meeting mem, you can also create links to new mems to capture supplementary information in more detail without cluttering the mem you’re currently working in.

For instance, when writing down the name of the company who’s pitching to you, type +, followed by the name of the company, and then hit Enter to create a link to a new mem. Click the link, and the new mem will open in the right-hand side bar. Here, you can jot down the most important facts about the company, and supplement the information with your own research after the meeting.

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Another typical facet of a VC’s daily work is performing due diligence on companies they’re thinking of investing in, to check that they are who they say they are.

One way to keep track of this process is by creating a mem for your due diligence work and adding tasks to it by typing [ ]. When you complete a task, you can check it off the list and see what you need to do next. Add links to notes from each of these investigations so you can find them all from one location.

You can also see all of your outstanding tasks by selecting Tasks in the left-hand side bar.

Writing up due diligence reports is also easy from within Mem. Related mems in the right-hand side bar displays any mems that share the same tags or contain similar phrases to the one you’re currently working on. This means that all of your relevant notes will be surfaced when it’s time to start compiling your report, making the process of pulling and combining the information you need both quick and painless.

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Twitter is also a major source of news and information, and you’ll probably find yourself checking it throughout the day. If you see a tweet or thread you want to revisit later, but don’t have time to read properly in the moment, you can use Mem It for Twitter to import it into your Mem account so that you can easily come back to it later. To use Mem It for Twitter, head to Flows, select the Mem It for Twitter tile, then follow the steps to connect and verify your Twitter account.

Once you’ve done this, the next time you see a tweet or series of tweets you want to capture, reply to the post with “@memdotai mem it”. This will send the tweet straight to your Mem account, as well as generating a public link to the mem as a reply. You can also add tags to your tweet so that the thread is automatically associated with a particular topic within Mem: e.g., “@memdotai mem it #investing #newcompany”.

What sets Mem it for Twitter apart from other tweet-saving products is that it also uses AI to generate a summary of the thread you save. Like I’ve written elsewhere, this allows you to take on new information quickly, and see how that information fits into your existing knowledge of a subject, making it easier to retain. If you’re a busy person with a packed schedule, it’s a crucial tool for staying on top of important, fast-moving things like industry news and trends.

In the evening

VCs typically spend a few evenings each week attending business dinners, pitch competitions, or other networking events. In these cases, capturing information – a company name to Google later; a fellow VC’s contact details – is as vital as it is during the workday – but it’s a little awkward if you whip out your laptop to take notes while you’re sharing a glass of wine with someone.

That’s why we’ve also developed Mem to be used on the go. Using Text to Mem, you can quickly send notes via SMS, Whatsapp, or Telegram straight to your Mem inbox. So, instead of writing something down in your Notes app – which you’ll promptly forget about later – you’ll be reminded of the conversations you had and the things you want to follow up on when you check your Mem inbox the next morning.

You can set up Text to Mem simply by heading to Flows, Texts, and then configuring your preferred texting platform.