Deal Coverage and Miss Review Loop
Track market coverage, dissect misses, and change investing behavior
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 98%
Create a recurring record of relevant deals completed by peer firms, then compare that market set with the opportunities your team actually evaluated. The coverage rate diagnoses sourcing: a very low rate means the team is not seeing enough of the market, while attempting to reach 100 percent can consume attention without improving judgment. Next, divide successful deals into those never encountered and those deliberately rejected. Review the rejected winners in detail, reconstruct the original decision, and look for repeated process failures. The output is not merely a postmortem; it is a behavioral adjustment. At Kleiner Perkins, this analysis connected several costly passes with remote first meetings, prompting Hamid to restructure his calendar around meeting founders in person.
Origin
Mamoon Hamid describes introducing this weekly review after arriving at Kleiner Perkins in 2017 and refining it over nine years.
Core principles
- 01Measure whether the team sees the opportunities that matter
- 02Treat missed winners as evidence rather than embarrassment
- 03Avoid maximizing coverage at the expense of differentiated judgment
- 04Translate recurring miss patterns into concrete operating changes
- 05Evaluate both unseen deals and consciously rejected deals
How to run it
- 1
Define the observable market
Choose a stable group of peer firms and collect the relevant deals they complete during each review period.
Pro tip Keep the peer set consistent enough to make coverage trends meaningful.
Watch out Do not treat every funded company as equally relevant to your mandate.
- 2
Measure encounter coverage
Mark whether anyone on the team met each company and calculate the proportion seen. Use this as a sourcing diagnostic rather than a performance target in isolation.
Pro tip Set a healthy range instead of demanding total coverage.
Watch out Chasing 100 percent coverage can turn seeing everything into the team's primary activity.
- 3
Classify the misses
Separate companies the team never saw from companies it evaluated and passed on. This distinguishes access problems from decision-quality problems.
Pro tip Preserve original notes so hindsight does not rewrite the initial reasoning.
Watch out Do not combine unseen deals and rejected deals into one undifferentiated miss count.
- 4
Reconstruct consequential passes
Revisit successful companies the team rejected and ask why the original round did not generate conviction. Compare several misses to locate recurring process patterns.
Pro tip Discuss misses at off-sites where the team can examine patterns across a longer period.
Watch out Avoid explaining every miss as an unavoidable outlier.
- 5
Change operating behavior
Convert repeated causes into explicit changes to sourcing, meetings, diligence, or decision rules. Monitor later reviews to determine whether those changes improve outcomes.
Pro tip Make calendar and workflow changes concrete enough to observe.
Watch out A postmortem that produces no behavioral change is only retrospective storytelling.
In the wild
Kleiner Perkins met Anthropic's founders over Zoom and tried the product but passed on an early round. Later review suggested that the remote interaction failed to convey the founders' ambitions with the same force as an in-person meeting. Hamid compared that miss with his recent investments and noticed that the first meeting for each had occurred in person.
→ He redesigned his calendar to prioritize in-person first meetings with founders.
The firm reviews that week's Series A investments made by roughly 30 to 40 peer firms, records whether it met each company, and monitors its coverage rate. Its initial target was 60 percent, later rising to roughly 70 percent without making universal coverage the goal.
→ The team can distinguish insufficient market access from poor selection among the deals it saw.
Common mistakes
Optimizing for total coverage
Seeing every company can become a vanity metric that consumes time without preserving differentiated sourcing or judgment.
Celebrating misses without diagnosing them
Treating missed winners as badges of honor prevents the team from finding correctable patterns in access, meetings, or evaluation.
Rewriting the past with hindsight
A review loses value when participants substitute what they now know for the evidence and reasoning available at the time.
Is it for you?
Best for
It is best for investment teams making repeated decisions in a fast-moving market with observable peer activity.
Not ideal for
It is not ideal when comparable transactions are private, infrequent, or impossible to identify reliably.
From the transcript
“we would look every week at the that week's series as that got done by our peer firms about thirty forty firms, and whether we…”
“We just had an off site a few weeks ago, and we go through again. We pour salt on the wounds and say, okay, we…”
“I've driven my whole calendar to like, I just don't want to do any meetings on Zoom anymore. I want to meet people in person”
From the episode
Venture Capital During the AI Revolution with Mamoon Hamid
Mamoon Hamid