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Use Cases

Finance

For PE associates, venture investors, IB analysts, family office staff, corporate development teams — anyone whose day is read a thing, compare it to other things, surface what matters.

If your day looks like this​

  • You receive a steady stream of CIMs, decks, and memos — every one needs a quick first read against your decision criteria.
  • You're tracking a portfolio of relationships — founders, sellers, advisors — and your inbox is the system of record.
  • You'd like on-the-go access to your deal and portfolio data — a teammate ready to pull the latest on a deal in transit or before a meeting.
  • You repeat the same questions on every new opportunity: market size, revenue quality, who's behind it, what's been said before.
  • You'd like a clean weekly view of what's active, what's stalled, and what needs a decision.

Think of Deck less as a filing cabinet and more as a teammate who's already on the desk — one you can send off on a research mission while you're between meetings, pull recent portfolio data from on the train, or leave running a quiet watch on the names you're tracking. Your deal book travels with you, not with your laptop.

Set up first​

  1. A Deals project — early-stage opportunities live here while you're sizing them up.
  2. A Brain project — your investment criteria, your decision frameworks, your model for what good looks like. Seed it once, and add a playbook like playbook_triage_new_cim.md codifying how you want a first read done — criteria to compare against, output shape, and the three questions to ask the banker.
  3. A scheduled task every Monday at 8 AM: "summarize everything new in Deals in the last week, flag anything that hits my criteria from Brain."
  4. Spin off per-deal projects as things mature — once an opportunity is moving toward a term sheet (or a name lands in the portfolio), give it its own project. Documents, threads, and follow-ups accumulate cleanly against the entity rather than diluting your broader Deals project.

Use cases worth setting up​

Forward a CIM, get a memo​

Forward an inbound deck or CIM to your assistant. Deck files the document under the right deal (or creates a new one), then you ask:

  • "Run the New-CIM playbook on this." — if you've written one, the whole triage happens with one line.
  • "How does this compare to the criteria in my Brain project?"
  • "What questions should I ask the banker before our first call?"
  • "Summarize the management bios and revenue mix."

The reply lands in your inbox; the materials sit in the project for next time. See How to engage with your assistant and Attachments.

Watch a deal that's gone quiet​

CC your assistant on threads with founders or sellers. After two weeks of no movement, ask: "which deals in Pipeline have gone quiet?" — Deck pulls the list with last-contact dates and last-discussed topics.

Vigil will eventually flag these without you asking. Until then, scheduled tasks get you 90% of the way there.

Weekly IC prep​

Set a recurring task: "every Sunday at 6 PM, list every deal moving to IC this week. For each, give me a one-paragraph thesis, three risks, and the most recent material I've stored."

Open Sunday evening, read for 15 minutes, walk into Monday already loaded.

Pipe HubSpot or Affinity into Deck​

HubSpot or a scheduled snapshot from your CRM keeps the latest pipeline state inside Deck. Ask "which deals have I touched twice but not advanced?" and Deck reads from the freshest snapshot.

Cross-check against your historical book​

A Brain project containing your firm's investment thesis, past portfolio companies, and known passes lets Deck answer "have we seen anyone like this before?" — particularly useful for thematic sourcing.

What good looks like after two weeks​

  • Every inbound is filed against the right opportunity without you doing anything.
  • Monday morning has a one-pager waiting for you summarizing the week.
  • Stale deals are surfaced before someone on the team asks.
  • IC prep is 30 minutes, not 3 hours.