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The $9.9M Fund Raised with a Memo, Not a Deck

The Story

When Packy McCormick raised Not Boring Capital Fund I, he didn’t use a pitch deck. He wrote a memo (Source 1).

“A venture capital fund is kind of like a startup. New fund managers put together a deck (or in my case, a memo) highlighting the types of companies they’re planning to invest in,” he wrote. Then, instead of keeping the memo private, he shared the actual document publicly, “lightly redacted and heavily annotated with commentary and clarification” (Source 1).

Only about five VCs have ever raised a fund using a memo rather than a pitch deck (Source 2).

He also shared his first LP Update publicly, showing the portfolio breakdown, investment thesis, and thoughts on the market. Transparency was the brand, and he applied it even to raising a venture fund (Source 1).

The fund hit the $9.9 million SEC cap with 133 LPs, “a lot for a small fund, but not as many as I’d like!” McCormick wrote. He even reserved 25 LP slots specifically for Not Boring readers (Source 1).

The transparency continued into fund management. McCormick shared that in Q2 2021 alone, Not Boring Capital invested $1.78 million in 20 companies, deploying faster than anticipated. He wrote: “I’m increasingly convinced that the right way for Not Boring Capital to differentiate and generate strong returns is to keep fund sizes small and flex on deployment speed” (Source 1).

Lesson for Creators

When your superpower is writing, use it everywhere, even where convention says to use slides. Packy didn’t just raise a fund differently. He turned the fundraising process itself into content that reinforced his brand. Sharing the memo and LP update publicly was both radical transparency and smart marketing: it demonstrated the exact skill (storytelling about companies) that he was selling to LPs. Your best format advantage should be applied to every part of your business, not just the obvious ones.

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