diligence-memo

name	diligence-memo
description	Use when producing or reviewing an internal investment diligence memo on a company — turns findings, market work, and risk into the firm's standard memo format, framed as analysis and never as advice to invest.

Diligence Memo

The firm's single diligence format, used to write memos on the diligence desk and to read them at the decision gate. A memo answers whether the evidence supports pursuing a company, shows its work, and cannot be mistaken for an instruction to invest.

Structure

1. Header block — company, the investment question, requesting Task, author, date, and status (draft / gate-ready / decided).
2. Recommendation framing — at most five sentences: pursue-with-conditions or pass, the confidence level, and the single most important reason. Framed as analysis; never phrased as an order to invest.
3. Company — what it does, stage, team, product, and the traction the evidence actually supports — separated from what the pitch claims.
4. Evidence table — one row per material finding: the finding, its source (document, data, call, or the market-map appendix), the source date, and a confidence grade (high / moderate / low). No row, no claim in the prose.
5. Market — the sized opportunity as a range with its assumptions, and the competitive placement, drawn from the market-map input.
6. Scenario analysis — bull, base, and bear cases, each with named assumptions and a rough likelihood. The bear case gets the same depth as the bull, measured in assumptions examined.
7. Risk register — every material risk, severity-ranked, each with whether it is resolvable, mitigated, or open at the deadline.
8. Conditions — for a pursue framing, the specific things that would have to be true or verified next; for a pass, what would have to change to reopen it.
9. Sources — every document, dataset, and call cited, with dates, so the memo can be audited without its author.
10. Disclaimer block — verbatim: this document is internal analysis for the firm's own decision-making only; it is not financial, investment, legal, or tax advice; it makes no recommendation to any person to buy, sell, or hold any instrument; the firm executes no transactions.

Quality bar

• The memo states plainly what would make it a pass — a reader can see the kill conditions.
• Every number in the prose traces to an evidence-table row or the market appendix in one hop.
• Confidence language travels with each claim, never pooled into a general caveat.
• The bear case is argued, not gestured at.
• No sentence reads as an instruction to invest, including in the recommendation framing.

Output format

A single memo following the structure above, plus the market-map appendix it draws on and a change log once it reaches gate-ready. The status line at top makes draft versus decided unmistakable.