David Park
Managing Director · Apex Ventures
"Investment committee prep used to take two days of deep work. NeuroAgent stress-tests the thesis in 30 minutes and surfaces the questions the IC will ask before I'm in the room. It's changed how I write memos."
David's investment committee required rigorous stress-testing of every thesis before approval. Building that analysis took two days of deep work per deal — a bottleneck that slowed Apex's ability to move quickly on competitive opportunities.
David began using NeuroAgent to run a pre-IC stress test on every investment thesis, treating the council as a simulated investment committee session.
IC prep time dropped from two days to four hours. The quality of David's memos improved — his approval rate on first presentation went from 60% to 85% — and the IC began requesting the council brief as a standard annex.
In venture capital, speed is a competitive advantage — but IC-quality analysis can't be rushed. David Park had spent years trying to solve that tension at Apex Ventures, a $280M fund investing in enterprise SaaS.
"The IC process exists for good reason," he explains. "Seven experienced people asking hard questions catches things I miss. But getting to that quality of analysis on my own takes two days. And in a competitive round, I might not have two days."
David's workflow before NeuroAgent: source the deal, spend two days writing the memo, present to IC, respond to the questions he hadn't anticipated, revise, represent. The two-day writing phase was a bottleneck, and the unanticipated questions were the gap.
He started using NeuroAgent as a simulated IC session. He'd feed in the investment thesis, the financials, the competitive context, and the key risks he'd identified. The council — particularly the Devil's Advocate, the Financial Stress-Tester, and the Risk Assessor — would surface the questions he hadn't built answers for.
"The first session I ran, the Devil's Advocate asked about customer concentration in a way I hadn't considered. Three of the company's top four customers were in the same vertical. The IC would absolutely have caught that. The agent caught it in 30 minutes, and I had the answer ready."
David now runs every thesis through a council session before he writes the memo. The questions the agents surface become the structure of his memo — he writes toward the concerns rather than around them.
"My approval rate on first presentation went from around 60% to 85%. More importantly, the IC has started asking for the council brief as an annex — they want to see which concerns were surfaced and how I addressed them. That's become a signal of memo quality on its own."
Key takeaways
- IC preparation time reduced from 2 days to 4 hours
- First-pass IC approval rate improved from 60% to 85%
- Council brief is now a required standard annex at investment committee
- Key IC questions surfaced in 30 minutes before the memo is written
- Customer concentration risk identified that the full IC would have caught
Frequently asked questions
Questions about how David and Apex Ventures used NeuroAgent.