Inbound Deal Flow

Opportunities that arrive unsolicited through open channels such as website forms, public email addresses and pitch events.

Example

A deck submitted through a form on an investor's website.

Inbound is not bad, but the process that delivered it carried no information about quality, so it deserves a more sceptical starting point.

Deal Flow — The stream of investment opportunities that reach an investor, across every channel they arrive through.
Adverse Selection — The tendency for the opportunities most available to you to be systematically worse than average, precisely because the better ones were taken by someone with earlier access.
Proprietary Deal Flow — Opportunities an investor sees because of who they know or what they have done, rather than because the opportunity was sent to a list.

In private markets, who you know decides what you see — Private companies are not listed anywhere. Networks determine the deals an investor hears about, the quality of diligence they can do and whether founders choose them. (9 min)
The best opportunities are rarely the ones being shown to everyone — Deal flow is not one thing. It arrives through channels with very different quality, and the channel an opportunity came through tells you something before you have read a word of it. (10 min)
Why what comes to you is a biased sample — The opportunities that push hardest for your attention are drawn from a worse pool than the ones that do not need to push, and urgency is the tell. (9 min)