A VC’s Diagram of Finding the Perfect Deal

David Paul
1 min readFeb 27, 2022

This week, I wrote a blog post about being frustrated about not finding a deal in 6-months that I wanted to do. I love writing because I can clarify my thinking and come up with essential principles or heuristics (my new favorite word) when it comes to evaluating and investing in early-stage companies.

This concept has gotten me so excited that I created a Venn diagram.

Only the convergence of these two fields makes me feel comfortable in investing. All of these traits I measure on a scale more than a simple pass/fail test. If the combination of founder and opportunity traits come together in a vertical SaaS or tech-enabled service business model, it is right in our sweet spot.

There are subsets of these traits that need to be calculated such as revenue concentration, historical performance, competition etc. I will get to that in a later post.

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