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Memos, frameworks, portfolio stories, and occasional heretical takes on early-stage investing in Aus/NZ. Published weekly-ish. The full archive lives on Substack.

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This week

Featured.

The memo Paul sent to LPs this week, unlocked and published in full.

IC Memo · unlocked

The three kinds of "too early" — and how to tell them apart.

Founders hear "you're too early" and think it's about timing. It almost never is. It's usually about evidence – and the three flavours of missing evidence tell you something very different about what to do next. Our internal framework, unlocked.

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RP-IC-04·26 Memo 031

Archive · recent

All Memos Essays Portfolio Frameworks
Apr 14 '26

The three kinds of "too early" — and how to tell them apart.

The most-heard rejection in venture is almost never about timing. Our IC framework for disambiguating "too early," unlocked.

IC Memo Read →
Apr 02 '26

WDWNTB — our five-question conviction framework.

"What Do We Need To Believe" is the scaffolding we use to stage-gate every deal. Six months of usage, five lessons from it.

Framework Read →
Mar 21 '26

How Restoke built the first AI ops system restaurants actually use.

A portfolio deep-dive with Assaf Stizki. From a broken kitchen in Fitzroy to 900 venues across three countries.

Portfolio Read →
Mar 10 '26

Seed rounds in Aus are broken. Here's how we're re-fixing ours.

Round sizes crept up. Valuations crept up. Milestones didn't. Our opinionated reset.

Essay Read →
Feb 27 '26

"GPT wrapper" isn't an insult. It's a category.

Most durable AI businesses are wrappers. The question is: what are they wrapped around? A taxonomy.

Essay Read →
Feb 12 '26

The JigSpace Series A memo — three years later.

What we believed in 2022, and how much of it turned out to be true. A public retrospective.

Portfolio Read →
Jan 28 '26

Why we pass — 200 deals, one diagram.

A full breakdown of 200 recent deal rejections and the six categories they fall into. Useful for founders prepping to raise.

IC Memo Read →
Jan 14 '26

The new deep-tech cheque: what a great pre-seed looks like in 2026.

Why the old $1M pre-seed is dead in deep tech, and what's replaced it. Our updated underwriting.

Framework Read →
Dec 19 '25

2025 in review: 1,847 pitches, 11 cheques, 3 lessons.

Our annual audit of deal flow, what closed, what didn't, and the three things we changed in our process.

Essay Read →
Nov 28 '25

Cuttable: co-leading a $4.5M seed — the full investment memo.

Our unredacted IC memo for leading the Cuttable Series Seed. How we got to yes in 10 days.

Portfolio Read →
View full archive on Substack →
Abnormal Potential

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Twice-monthly dispatch from the Rampersand IC. What we're underwriting. What we passed on, and why. What the market is doing that no one is saying. No spam, no sponsor-sections, no summary of the week's news.

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