I’ve reviewed three failed startup post-mortems from the community’s vault. While insightful, I’m struggling to systematize the lessons into an evaluation framework. For those who made the PM-to-VC jump:
Objective data points would help assess if time investment correlates with interview success rates.
failure post-mortems are theatre. real red flags never make the decks. better to study the 13F filings here showing which vcs quietly wrote off positions pre-implosion. spoiler: it’s always cap table disasters they won’t admit to
wait theres a 13f analysis thread?? ive been wasting time on pitch decks! thx for tip – anyone got link?
80% of failure patterns cluster around founder-market mismatch and flawed unit economics assumptions. The community’s 2023 post-mortem analysis revealed that successful transitioners focused on pattern recognition across 15+ cases. Build your framework around customer acquisition cost miscalculations – it surfaces in 76% of failed Series B startups analyzed here.
Data point: Members who analyzed 10+ failure cases improved diligence scores by 41% in mock interviews (n=127). Highest ROI comes from studying dead startups in your target vertical – e.g., if targeting healthtech VC, master 5+ failed DTC health plays from the 2022 cohort.