What this is
No new concepts. This is the whole course, applied to one final, complete scenario: writing the investment committee memo for a new Series A opportunity, the document that turns a deal partner's conviction into a fund-level decision.
The company: Aldergate Systems
- Series A, raising $9m at a $32m pre-money valuation
- Vertical software for independent pharmacies; $95k MRR, 16% MoM growth, retention flattens near 82% at Week 12
- Team: CEO ran operations at a regional pharmacy chain for 9 years; CTO is a first-time founder but shipped the entire product solo pre-seed
- Market: SOM estimated at ~$210m over 5 years, driven by consolidation pressure on independent pharmacies needing better tooling to compete with chains
- Two direct competitors have emerged in the last 8 months, both venture-backed, one 18 months ahead on revenue
- Your fund led their seed at an $11m post-money; you currently hold 16%
MRR
$95k
MoM growth
16%
Retention (Wk 12)
82%
Current ownership
16%
Direct competitors
2 new
Your task
- Restate the original seed thesis (Lesson 6) and assess whether 18 months of evidence has strengthened or weakened it.
- Sanity-check the $32m pre-money against ARR-multiple comps for this growth rate (Lesson 16).
- Assess defensibility given two new competitors (Lesson 11), what specifically would make Aldergate durable against them, or would it not be?
- Decide your fund's pro-rata participation (Lessons 18, 23) and how it fits your current reserve position (Lesson 22) for this vintage.
- Model resulting ownership under the dilution mechanics from Lesson 17, with and without exercising full pro-rata.
- Propose liquidation preference and board terms for the round (Lessons 18-19), what would you push for as the existing investor with real leverage in this negotiation?
- Name two concrete ways your fund can add board value beyond capital here (Lesson 28), specific to Aldergate's actual gaps, not generic.
- State what you'd track monthly (Lesson 33) to know within one quarter, not one year, whether the competitive threat is winning or Aldergate is holding its lead.
- Give a final recommendation: lead or follow the round, pass entirely, or push for a smaller "signal-preserving" check (Lesson 29) instead.
There's no single right answer, and that's deliberate. A strong response might argue the operational-domain-expertise moat (Lesson 7's team read, reinforced by 18 months of execution evidence) is durable enough to justify paying up for the round despite new competition, since a first-time competitor without the CEO's 9 years of pharmacy operations experience will struggle to match the product's specificity. A different, equally defensible response might argue that two well-funded competitors emerging this fast signals the category is now a land-grab, and the fund should preserve reserves for other portfolio companies rather than defend ownership in an increasingly contested market.
| Scenario | Competitive outcome | Exit multiple on invested capital |
|---|---|---|
| Downside | Loses category lead to a competitor | ~0.5x-1x |
| Base (revised plan, defended lead) | Holds roughly even share, market grows | ~4x-8x |
| Upside (the power-law outcome) | Becomes the category-defining outlier | ~30x+ |
Where to go from here
You've now walked one company through its entire arc: a seed thesis formed on a strong, domain-expert team; a Series A decision made under genuine competitive uncertainty, not a clean, obviously-right call; and a fund-level judgment about where reserves and board attention should actually go, exactly the kind of decision Lesson 21's power law says a fund's entire return ultimately hinges on getting right often enough.
If you want to go further from here: the same testable-thesis discipline from Lesson 6 applies to any deal, in any sector, and the same reserve-allocation logic from Lessons 22-23 applies to any portfolio of competing follow-on decisions, well beyond venture specifically. The habit worth keeping is the one this course kept returning to from Lesson 6 onward, state the bet as a specific, falsifiable sentence, then go looking for the evidence that would prove it wrong before committing more capital.
Congratulations on completing the course.