The Examiner's Radar: Catch the Subtle Signal
Date
Jun 2, 2026
Classification
- Startups
#
- Investment/Market Trends
Acquaintance Choi Ji-in, Analyst
As a current investment manager, I cover startup stories I know a little about, various aspects of life, and just stories I know a bit about .
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Becoming a High-Performing VC Investment Manager 3
#VentureCapital #InvestmentManager #DealFlow #TrustAsset #InvestmentAnalysis
🫑 3-Line Summary
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The role of a VC investment manager is to manage the deal flow from initial contact to payment to ensure it remains uninterrupted. They must constantly monitor the situation to prevent resources from becoming bogged down in specific stages and neglecting the earlier stages.
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To have a long career in the small VC industry of approximately 1,000 to 1,500 people, you must build a solid reputation and trust assets by transparently disclosing information to be shared while remaining silent on sensitive information.
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Early-stage startup investors must possess a keen radar capable of detecting subtle signals in various settings, such as everyday pop-up stores or casual conversations over drinks. It is essential to have the ability to assess the details of metrics while simultaneously drawing the big picture of the business.
🥦 Insight
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Creating an inexhaustible spring through a balance of concentration and dispersion
When you become engrossed in immediate investment screening, it is easy to overlook the management of the early-stage pipeline that will become your future growth engines. Founders and planners, too, must not get bogged down solely in the immediate enhancement of the product. They must establish a system to routinely manage distribution flows that continuously identify potential customers in the market.
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The survival rules of a narrow ecosystem where reputation is capital
The industry is smaller than you might think, so distorted information or careless words and actions quickly come back to haunt you. The self-control to clearly distinguish when to speak and when to remain silent is the surest cheat code for building irreplaceable trust capital in the market in the long run.
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Extracting trend signals from subtle noise
To identify the potential of an early-stage business that has not yet been proven by numbers, you must keep your sensory antennas wide open, regardless of whether you are online or offline. Above all, a sense of balance is crucial: the reason to scrutinize the meticulous numerical details within financial statements, and the emotion to see through to the essence of why users are enthusiastic about the service.
🥄 A spoonful of execution
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Are you pouring so much energy into meeting the specific metrics of your current project that you are missing the big picture of why we started this work in the first place? On your way home from work today, try subtly exposing your antenna to small changes or trends in your daily life to gather signals of new insights.
—— View Original ——
This is the 'Becoming a High-Performing VC Investment Manager' series, which I write one of every year.
I believe one of the major advantages of this profession is that, even as I gain more experience, there are still many areas where I am lacking and many new things to learn.
To VCs, a 'deal' refers to an individual investment case.
In the work of an investment manager, it is important to ensure that deals flow continuously.
Based on our company's standards, the deal process consists of the following stages: Contact → Meeting → In-depth Review → Internal IR → Investment Screening → Due Diligence/Contract → Payment.
Of these, the area where investment managers spend the most resources is the 'investment screening' stage.
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