Writing the IC memo? The hardest section is the one nobody can staff.
If you sit on an investment committee — or write the memos that go to one — you know the weakness of every risks section: it was written by the person who wants the deal done. Big funds staff an adversarial read; small funds don't have the bodies, and the deal closes in days. Timepoint fills exactly that gap: the downside section, generated and argued by simulation, in time for the vote.
Timepoint AI is a Santa Monica company that runs decisions as grounded simulations: the specific, named actors around your decision, played forward through branching timelines. Findings come back ranked, with uncertainty stated in words — never sold as a prediction, always labeled as the AI simulation they are. Here's the full range of work →
The champion's problem
The issue isn't honesty — it's structure. A champion's downside list contains the risks that occurred to the champion. What an IC actually needs is the risk that occurred to no one, plus a disciplined answer to the only question that matters at the margin: what would have to be true for this to work — and which of those load-bearing assumptions does every rosy scenario quietly share?
So the deal runs as simulation: the market forward, the incumbent's product meeting from their side of the table, and the portal run — starting from the write-down everyone says can't happen and reasoning backward to its earliest common cause.
A seed fund (fictional) is deciding on a vertical-SaaS company selling scheduling-and-billing software into dental clinics, at a price that assumes a land-grab. One live question: does this survive the incumbent practice-management suite noticing?
| Rank | Branch | What the runs showed | Stated uncertainty |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Incumbent bundles a clone, free | The modal branch. The incumbent's simulated roadmap meeting reaches for the bundle reflexively — but the clone ships late and undercooked in most runs, and the startup survives if it has moved upmarket to multi-location groups by then. | Stable on the response, divergent on the timing — 12 to 30 months across runs. |
| 2 | Incumbent ignores; land-grab holds | The memo's base case. Real, but rarer than the memo priced — it required the incumbent's (simulated) org to stay distracted by its own migration, which several runs didn't grant. | The optimistic branch is the fragile one; the runs say the price assumes it. |
| 3 | Channel partner acquires early | The branch nobody had discussed: the distribution partner the startup depends on is also its most motivated acquirer — capping the upside the valuation was paying for. | Low weight across runs, high consequence; belongs in the memo as a term-sheet consideration, not a footnote. |
Backward from every good outcome: the founder's head of sales — the one person who has sold into dental groups before — is still there in month eighteen. Forward-looking diligence had a retention line item for the founder. The simulation priced the wrong person's departure.
What lands in your memo
A one-page appendix: branches ranked with the reasoning shown, the incumbent's most likely move and its timing spread, the load-bearing assumption to verify before wiring — and the sentence an LP most wants to see in an emerging manager's memo: here is what would have to be true, and here is how we'll know early if it isn't. Engagements are founding-pilot priced and scoped in one call; if the question is sensitive, it can run zero-knowledge — on public information only.
See it in practice
- Six sample deal-team simulations — term-sheet negotiations, takeover defenses, LBO rate scenarios — example runs of the same engine
- A full engagement, worked end to end — a fictional venture firm allocating one partnership slot across three portfolio companies
- Why the engine refuses to bluff — the realism checks and the enforcement gate behind every deliverable
Field Notes on Deal Risk — an 8-page guide to stress-testing a decision across its branches: the five practices, a worked example, and the checklist. No gate, no sales call.