EXPERIENCE 003
Show Me What You Saw
Show Me What You Saw
Show Me What You Saw
Venture Associate, Missouri Technology Corporation. January to August 2022.
Venture Associate, Missouri Technology Corporation. January to August 2022.
Venture Associate, Missouri Technology Corporation. January to August 2022.
A state-backed venture fund investing in Missouri technology companies. Engaged as a consultant by unanimous Executive Committee approval, converted to staff in March 2022, and working as the sole analytical capacity in a three-person investment function.
The work divided in two. Portfolio management meant a health audit across more than seventy active investments, reconstructed from financial statements, board minutes, investor updates and revenue and headcount reporting, covering instrument structure across preferred equity and convertible notes, follow-on activity, compliance with investment terms, and support for shareholder consents and note conversions. Investment diligence meant running the IDEA Fund application cycle, scoring applicants, drafting Investment Committee and board memos, and attending portfolio company board meetings on behalf of the fund.
A state-backed venture fund investing in Missouri technology companies. Engaged as a consultant by unanimous Executive Committee approval, converted to staff in March 2022, and working as the sole analytical capacity in a three-person investment function.
The work divided in two. Portfolio management meant a health audit across more than seventy active investments, reconstructed from financial statements, board minutes, investor updates and revenue and headcount reporting, covering instrument structure across preferred equity and convertible notes, follow-on activity, compliance with investment terms, and support for shareholder consents and note conversions. Investment diligence meant running the IDEA Fund application cycle, scoring applicants, drafting Investment Committee and board memos, and attending portfolio company board meetings on behalf of the fund.
Thirty applications came in that cycle. I scored twenty-eight of them, and not one of my scores decided anything.
Thirty applications came in that cycle. I scored twenty-eight of them, and not one of my scores decided anything.
Thirty applications came in that cycle. I scored twenty-eight of them, and not one of my scores decided anything.
The executive director scored independently of me. Afterward we worked through the places where our reads diverged, and recommendations went to the board from there. That was the shape of it.
Reading one application teaches you about a company. Reading thirty in a compressed window teaches you about applications.
By the second week I was reading on two levels, following the pitch and seeing how it was built, the way an architect takes in an arch and the ribs behind it. The form asks the right question. Question twenty-three: what alternatives or competitors currently address this problem, and why is your solution meaningfully different. Nearly every answer I read described the applicant. Faster, cheaper, better designed, built by people who had lived the problem themselves. Very few described the competitors at all, and almost none explained why those competitors, staffed and funded and paying attention to the same market, had arrived somewhere else.
That gap became the thing I was actually reading for. Not what makes you different. Why did everyone else choose otherwise?
A founder who can answer that is showing you the reasoning that produced the solution rather than the solution itself. Sometimes the answer is that the incumbents are held in place by legacy customers, or by a distribution model they cannot abandon, or by an assumption the whole market inherited and stopped testing. Sometimes the answer is that nobody looked. The second kind arrives with more confidence than the first.
Three shapes kept recurring. There is the moonshot, where the technology may simply not work and the real assessment is whether the team can survive finding out. There is the obvious recombination, where existing pieces are assembled in a way that looks inevitable afterward and was invisible before. Uber is the example everyone reaches for, and the useful part is what it actually combined: GPS in every pocket, mobile payment rails that already worked, and a for-hire vehicle market that had existed for a century. None of the three was new. What was new was noticing they could be joined, and noticing that in advance is much harder than the retelling suggests. And there is the crowded market entrant, where the entire case rests on that competitor question, and where having no answer to it comes close to disqualifying on its own.
What I had not expected was how much the institution shapes the reading. The IDEA Fund exists, in its own description, to invest in Missouri companies and create economic impact for the state. That is not a footnote attached to an investment thesis. It is the thesis. A state fund is not underwriting a return the way a private fund is, and it measures itself by the private capital its investments go on to attract, and by the jobs those companies create inside Missouri. A plain business that will hire forty people in the state can matter more than a more elegant one that will do its hiring somewhere else. When I judged a university venture competition the year before, the currency was reputational instead, and the reading shifted accordingly without anyone announcing it.
The hardest thing to hold onto across thirty of these is that a compelling founder is evidence about the founder. It is not evidence about the business. The two get conflated more often than anyone would admit, because conviction is legible and a moat is not. A company with no defensible position can be represented by someone genuinely impressive, and that impression survives the analysis unless you keep pulling the two apart on purpose.
I recused myself from two applications that cycle. In each case, I had a prior connection to the company that would have made my score something other than a score.
The round closed in April 2022. The board approved one and a half million dollars across eight companies: Impetus Agriculture, Venku, DataPlant, iSite Media, RhoDx, Aegis Digital Health, Hire Henry and Splitsy. Four of them had cleared my cut line. Two sat in the bottom half of my ranking. My three highest-scoring applicants were not funded at all.
That turned out to be the part worth learning. A score is a compressed opinion, and the decision was never a ranking exercise. It came down to which companies were believed to be plausible and ready, which is a judgment no number carries well and which several people were making at once from different vantage points. Every MTC investment requires private matching capital, and whether a company would actually secure it was frequently an open question at the moment of decision rather than a settled fact. There was a great deal that the sheet in front of me could not hold.
I had built a careful read of thirty companies, and that read was one voice in a room. Knowing the difference between holding a defensible opinion and holding the decision is most of what the job taught me. It is also the thing I would want to be trusted with again.
The executive director scored independently of me. Afterward we worked through the places where our reads diverged, and recommendations went to the board from there. That was the shape of it.
Reading one application teaches you about a company. Reading thirty in a compressed window teaches you about applications.
By the second week I was reading on two levels, following the pitch and seeing how it was built, the way an architect takes in an arch and the ribs behind it. The form asks the right question. Question twenty-three: what alternatives or competitors currently address this problem, and why is your solution meaningfully different. Nearly every answer I read described the applicant. Faster, cheaper, better designed, built by people who had lived the problem themselves. Very few described the competitors at all, and almost none explained why those competitors, staffed and funded and paying attention to the same market, had arrived somewhere else.
That gap became the thing I was actually reading for. Not what makes you different. Why did everyone else choose otherwise?
A founder who can answer that is showing you the reasoning that produced the solution rather than the solution itself. Sometimes the answer is that the incumbents are held in place by legacy customers, or by a distribution model they cannot abandon, or by an assumption the whole market inherited and stopped testing. Sometimes the answer is that nobody looked. The second kind arrives with more confidence than the first.
Three shapes kept recurring. There is the moonshot, where the technology may simply not work and the real assessment is whether the team can survive finding out. There is the obvious recombination, where existing pieces are assembled in a way that looks inevitable afterward and was invisible before. Uber is the example everyone reaches for, and the useful part is what it actually combined: GPS in every pocket, mobile payment rails that already worked, and a for-hire vehicle market that had existed for a century. None of the three was new. What was new was noticing they could be joined, and noticing that in advance is much harder than the retelling suggests. And there is the crowded market entrant, where the entire case rests on that competitor question, and where having no answer to it comes close to disqualifying on its own.
What I had not expected was how much the institution shapes the reading. The IDEA Fund exists, in its own description, to invest in Missouri companies and create economic impact for the state. That is not a footnote attached to an investment thesis. It is the thesis. A state fund is not underwriting a return the way a private fund is, and it measures itself by the private capital its investments go on to attract, and by the jobs those companies create inside Missouri. A plain business that will hire forty people in the state can matter more than a more elegant one that will do its hiring somewhere else. When I judged a university venture competition the year before, the currency was reputational instead, and the reading shifted accordingly without anyone announcing it.
The hardest thing to hold onto across thirty of these is that a compelling founder is evidence about the founder. It is not evidence about the business. The two get conflated more often than anyone would admit, because conviction is legible and a moat is not. A company with no defensible position can be represented by someone genuinely impressive, and that impression survives the analysis unless you keep pulling the two apart on purpose.
I recused myself from two applications that cycle. In each case, I had a prior connection to the company that would have made my score something other than a score.
The round closed in April 2022. The board approved one and a half million dollars across eight companies: Impetus Agriculture, Venku, DataPlant, iSite Media, RhoDx, Aegis Digital Health, Hire Henry and Splitsy. Four of them had cleared my cut line. Two sat in the bottom half of my ranking. My three highest-scoring applicants were not funded at all.
That turned out to be the part worth learning. A score is a compressed opinion, and the decision was never a ranking exercise. It came down to which companies were believed to be plausible and ready, which is a judgment no number carries well and which several people were making at once from different vantage points. Every MTC investment requires private matching capital, and whether a company would actually secure it was frequently an open question at the moment of decision rather than a settled fact. There was a great deal that the sheet in front of me could not hold.
I had built a careful read of thirty companies, and that read was one voice in a room. Knowing the difference between holding a defensible opinion and holding the decision is most of what the job taught me. It is also the thing I would want to be trusted with again.
Michael Curnes