Guide
Investor update videos: the spoken note, and what belongs in writing
Investors read updates in batches, quickly, looking for what changed. A memo is the right instrument for that. What a memo cannot carry is how you sound, and how you sound is what makes somebody pick up the phone for you later. This page covers the short spoken note that sits beside the written update, and the one thing that must never go into it.
- The length of a spoken update people actually finish
- 2-3 min
- Specific requests per update. Named, not general.
- 1 ask
- Forward-looking numbers that belong in a recording
- 0
The memo is the record. The video is the relationship.
A written update is skimmable, searchable, forwardable to a partner, and comparable against the one you sent last month. Those four properties are exactly what an investor needs from reporting, and a video has none of them.
What the memo cannot carry is conviction, fatigue, and the difference between a founder who is worried and a founder who is pretending not to be. Those are the things that make an investor make an introduction on a Tuesday without being asked twice, and they do not survive a bulleted list.
So the video is an addition and never a replacement. Send the written update. Attach a two to three minute spoken note to it.
The reason this works has nothing to do with production quality. Your investors hear from thirty or forty companies in more or less the same template. A short, plainly recorded note is different in the only way that matters: it takes ninety seconds of their time and it feels like being spoken to.
There is also a compounding effect nobody mentions. The month you need something badly is not the month to start being memorable.
Where each part of the update belongs
The sorting rule: if they will compare it, quote it, forward it or defend it later, it is text.
| Say it on camera | Put it in the memo | |
|---|---|---|
| This month's key decision | The reasoning, out loud | The one-line summary |
| Revenue, burn, runway, headcount | Skip it. It cannot be compared. | A table, same shape every month |
| The ask | Specific, named, said once | Repeated in writing so it can be forwarded |
| Anything carrying a caveat | Caveats evaporate in speech | Written, where the caveat survives |
| Anything about the future | Nothing. See the warning below. | Hedged, dated, reviewed |
What belongs on camera
Keep it to the things that are better heard than read.
- The one decision of the month, with the reasoning. The reasoning, not the outcome. How you think is the thing they invested in and the thing a table cannot show.
- What surprised you, ideally in a customer's own words. One sentence a real person said is worth a paragraph of your summary of it.
- The specific ask, said out loud. Not any intros would be great. An intro to a VP of Operations at a logistics company between two hundred and a thousand people, and here are the three names at the top of the list.
- One thank you, named. The investors who helped last month should hear it, and the ones who did not should hear that helping gets noticed.
This is the whole editor
Highlight a phrase and a clip lands on those exact words. No timeline, no keyframes, no layers.
What belongs in writing instead
The test is whether an investor will need to compare it, quote it, forward it, or defend it later. If any of those is true, it is text.
The numbers table is text. Revenue, net new, churn, burn, runway, headcount, cash in the bank. They will line it up against last month, and nobody is going to scrub a recording to do that.
Anything with a caveat is text. Caveats survive in writing and evaporate in speech. Three enterprise trials, with the note that two are inside the same procurement cycle, is a materially different fact from three enterprise trials, and the note is precisely the part a spoken sentence drops.
Anything an accountant, a lawyer or a future acquirer might read is text. Cap table changes, option grants, legal matters, anything with a number that has to be exactly right.
Anything they might forward is text. A partner reading a memo spends a minute. A partner sent a recording has to decide whether to bother, and that is a decision you do not want between your update and the person who could help.
Keep the tone in mind too. Aim for how you sound in a hallway after a board meeting, not how you sound on a stage. Investors calibrate on the gap between those two voices, and closing it is worth more than any amount of polish.
The warning: anything that could be heard as a promise
This is the part to be blunt about, and for some founders it is the reason not to make these at all.
Spoken language slides into forecast without anybody deciding to do it. In writing you hedge automatically. On camera it is a conversation, so you say the confident version: we will be at a hundred thousand by December, the round basically closes next month, that enterprise deal is done. None of those sentences would have survived the memo, and all three are easy to say out loud.
Three consequences, all slow and none of them hypothetical. It becomes the expectation you are measured against, and the measurement happens in a meeting you are not in. It gets stored, because updates are forwarded, saved and pulled into a diligence folder years later, and a recording is the version nobody can politely misremember. And statements about a company's future prospects are treated seriously in an investment context, which makes an unscripted recording a poor place to be casual about them.
That last point is not legal advice, and the specifics depend on your jurisdiction and your own paperwork. Ask your counsel what your documents actually require before this becomes a monthly habit.
The working rule is short. Report the past, ask for the future. Here is what we saw, here is what we are trying, here is what would help. Never here is what will happen.
Two hard lines are worth keeping permanently. Nothing unclosed goes on camera: not a round, not a contract, not an offer, not a hire. And assume the recording is permanent and forwardable, because a private link is a courtesy rather than access control.
Making one every month without it becoming a project
Record it after the memo is written, never before. The memo is the outline, you already did the thinking, and talking to your own headings takes one pass.
One take, no script, two to three minutes, phone or laptop at eye level with a window in front of you. A rehearsed reading sounds worse than a slightly imperfect take, and investors are unusually good at hearing which one they are watching.
Put captions on it. A meaningful share of these get watched on a phone between meetings with the sound off, and an update nobody can follow silently gets closed.
Send it as a link rather than an attachment, hosted somewhere you can revoke, and keep the same slot every month so it arrives as a rhythm rather than an event.
The only step that turns this into a project is the edit: trimming the false starts, timing the captions, keeping the length honest when the second take ran long.
Cutroom does that step. A spoken take of up to 3 minutes, which is about the natural length of one of these, comes back as a finished 9:16 MP4: every word transcribed, silence and filler trimmed, captions timed in one of six styles, footage placed on the words that need showing. A batch is 100 credits and the export is 20 credits per exported minute, so a finished two minute update is about 140 credits, and Lite is $19.99 a month for 1,250 credits, roughly eight updates of that length, cancel in one click. The trade-offs to know first: exports are vertical 9:16 only, which suits a phone and looks odd on a desktop monitor, and there is no subtitle file, so the captions are burned into the picture rather than delivered as a separate track.
Questions people ask
- Should investor updates be video or written?
- Written, always, with video as an optional addition. The memo is the record: it gets compared against last month, forwarded to a partner, and searched two years later during diligence. The spoken note carries what the memo cannot, which is how you sound. Sending only a video is the one arrangement that makes you harder to help.
- How long should an investor update video be?
- Two to three minutes. One decision with its reasoning, one surprise, one specific ask, one thank you. Past four minutes it starts competing with the memo it was meant to complement, and the person watching it is doing so between two meetings rather than at a desk.
- How often should I send an investor update video?
- The written update should be monthly, which is what most investors expect. The video can match that if it genuinely takes twenty minutes, or run quarterly if it does not. A video attached to nine months out of twelve is better than one attached to three, and a missing memo is worse than either.
- What do I put in the video during a bad month?
- The bad month, first, before anything good. Investors have seen more bad months than you have, and what they are listening for is whether you know why. What happened, what you think caused it, what you are changing, what would help. The trust problem is not a bad month. It is a bad month that arrives as a surprise in month three.
- Do investor update videos need captions?
- Yes. These get watched on phones, in transit, between meetings, often with the sound off, and frequently by people reading in their second language. Captions are also the difference between an update somebody skims in ninety seconds and one they postpone until an evening that never arrives.
Send the memo, attach three honest minutes, ask for one specific thing by name, and keep every sentence about the future out of the recording.