Show HN: How I take notes as a VC, and the app I built for it

If it's not obvious from the title, I'm a VC and I spend a ton of time in meetings with founders. What's less obvious is all the other things. After treading water for at least a decade, I am deeply suspect of any VC's organizational capabilities. Mostly my own.

Believe it or not, for the longest time, my notes lived in saved (and unsaved) text files in Sublime Text. At some point I've tried using TiddlyWiki, bandwagoned onto Notion and Obsidian, and once even opened Microsoft OneNote. My brain doesn't work like that, the 5,715 unread emails in my inbox is proof of a losing battle.

Asana helped, I tried sprint planning like my time working for a startup, but I quickly learned you can’t budget 10 points for firefighting. A more recent addition has been Granola, great UI, but I realize I actually don't find AI notetakers helpful. If you can imagine, I look at 2,000 companies a year, and meet just under a quarter of them, at some point they all start to blend together.

Logseq came the closest, the daily journal clicked for me, but I wanted mobile, reliable sync, and a search that didn’t need the gentle touch of a crowbar. I love you Logseq team. <3

So I built a tool of my own, DayCarp (daycarp.com) it’s a minimalist notetaker with Sublime’s minimap, Granola’s AI notetaking, Logseq’s journal, and some of Asana’s tasking. It also has nice quality of life features like inline images, templates, Excel-style calculations when you highlight numbers, and of course AI, bring your own API key, self-host, or use mine.

Go to DayCarp.com and try it free, would appreciate the roast. It’s something I genuinely use every day, and I think others might find useful.

Here’s how I take notes in a meeting with a founder:

1. I setup my framework with these headings: Team, Product, Business Model, IP/Regulatory, Market, Competition, Traction, Financing, Decision & Next Steps. This is my mental framework, and also roughly the order by which I ask questions. I start with getting to know the people, and end with the financing discussion. It’s not unlike a sales call from the VC side as well, we need to sell great founders as much as founders need great VCs.

2. Under each heading I put a bullet or two about things I learned about the company after spending all of 45 seconds looking at their deck or website. I usually also put one or two things in common with the founder that I can bring up in conversation.

3. I put “Q: [question]”; under each bullet where I want to push the founder, for tech-heavy pre-revenue startups I might push on IP, or problem; for a classic SaaS, I’ll try to push on quality of traction. I’ll also try to size the market to get an idea, founders often share a massive number in an unrelated market.

4. If I don’t have much time, I’ll pitch the startup back to the founder “I understand you do XYZ for so and so, did I understand that correctly?”, that saves about 10 minutes off the pitch. I’ll also preface that I’m conversational and that we might jump around, to avoid the pitch entirely. All founders have a narrative and a story they want to tell, and they’ll tactfully try to avoid their weaknesses, the purpose of the structure is to make sure I hit the parts the matter.

5. The hardest to evaluate, and the most important are teams, their motivations, ambitions, vision, how they work with others, there’s a lot you miss in a first meeting.

6. I’ll write down my impression and decision right at the end. I will communicate this to my team when we review pipeline. I like using AI notes features here, to help close some of the gaps, typically I miss some of the customer names, or an offhand comment about a partnership.

7. I delete the note and blacklist the founder if they don't mention AI, Andreessen or Sequoia.

--Alex