I'm reading a business plan that I received. 10 honking megabytes of brainwaves put to paper. 115 carefully crafted pages which gets me deep, really deep, into the mind of the entrepreneur. You are thinking to yourself, self, how could a simple business plan allow the VC to learn tons about me and my people.

Simple.

Make tons of changes to your document, pass it to your 'advisors' for advising, get back their edits, make more changes, save and send the document to me without accepting all changes and stripping out all the notes and comments.

Consider these choices tidbits left in the document:

"Segal used work for Microsoft so skip the name dropping, save it for the afternoon meeting, they are clueless about Redmond."



"When you talk through this point on your slides, make Chanukah jokes, he is Jewish and will get them"



"I'd delete this section since we don't have these features on the roadmap and haven't figured out how to code this unless you believe the investors won't catch this."



Scratched out "Exchange sucks resources like a vampire in heat", replaced with "Exchange is resource intensive under certain scenarios"



Scratched out "Competitors are 10 years behind us and will never catch up", replaced with "There is competition out there"



"VCs are typically stupid when it comes to this section so be prepared for a dumb question blizzard."



Scratched out "Beta is in 6 months" replaced with "code is out there now"

Sweet, eh?

If you are so inclined, you might want to create what I call the "Yo! Are YOU DAMN SURE" macro for your copy of Word that checks a variety of things before you send it out the door.

I love this gig.