Internal Comms & Meetings

How to write an exec brief as Asset Management Founders

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Asset Management Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You're managing a $50M emerging fund with two people. Every quarter, you spend two to three days assembling an LP update: pulling portfolio company financials from your inbox, writing a market commentary paragraph from scratch, summarizing positions you already know cold, and then wrestling with a Google Slides deck that never looks right. You don't have an analyst to draft the memo or a designer to clean up the deck. The brief you send to your LP advisory board before your annual meeting gets written at 11pm the Sunday before. Meanwhile, every hour you spend formatting slides is an hour you're not spending on deal flow or LP relationships.

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Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Asset Management Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A repeatable exec brief workflow that pulls from your live fund data — transactions, portfolio metrics, and meeting notes — and drafts the narrative, so quarterly LP updates take 45 minutes instead of two days

A Meeting Notes archive linked to your brief template, so every LP call, portfolio company check-in, and board meeting feeds directly into your next update with action items already extracted

A Presentation Agent output — polished, on-brand slides built from your brief text — ready to export to PDF or share as a link, with no Sunday-night formatting sessions

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Presentation Agent Meeting Notes

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Plaid transaction data on a schedule for fund-level cash flow visibility, and connects directly to Stripe on a schedule for portfolio company revenue signals. Meeting Notes captures transcripts from your LP calls and founder check-ins and stores them in a searchable archive that the brief-drafting prompt can reference. Your Gmail is connected directly through Starch so the Email Triage app can surface LP threads and draft context-aware replies. The Presentation Agent takes the finished brief text and builds the slide deck — no additional integrations required.

Prompts to copy

Draft a 6-page executive brief for my Q1 2026 LP update. Include: fund performance summary (pull from my Plaid transaction data and Stripe subscription revenue for portfolio co Acme), portfolio company highlights from my last three meeting notes with founders, one paragraph of market commentary on private credit conditions, and a 90-day outlook. Tone should be direct and data-first — my LPs are institutional allocators who don't need hype.

Build a 10-slide LP quarterly update deck based on this exec brief. Slide 1: fund snapshot with key numbers. Slides 2-4: portfolio company updates with a mini table per company. Slide 5: market commentary. Slide 6: pipeline overview. Slides 7-9: financials (net IRR, TVPI, DPI). Slide 10: 90-day priorities. Use a clean, serif-adjacent font and dark navy header bars.

Triage my inbox this week and flag every email from an LP or portfolio company CEO. For each flagged thread, draft a one-paragraph reply and set a 48-hour follow-up reminder if I haven't responded.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect your Plaid account so Starch syncs your fund's bank transactions on a schedule — this gives you real cash position, capital calls paid in, and management fee receipts without manually exporting from your bank.

2 Connect your Stripe account so Starch syncs recurring revenue data from any portfolio companies that share access — useful for SaaS-heavy funds where MRR growth is a headline metric in every LP update.

3 Turn on Meeting Notes and run it in the background for every founder check-in and LP call for the next 30 days. It transcribes in real time and archives summaries with action items extracted by person.

4 At quarter-end, open Starch and type your exec brief prompt — reference your meeting notes archive, your Plaid cash data, and any portfolio metrics you've manually entered. Starch drafts the narrative.

5 Review the draft brief for accuracy on numbers; Starch pulls from your live synced data but you know your portfolio — correct any figures that need context a data source can't capture (e.g., a deal that closed verbally but hasn't wired yet).

6 Once the brief reads right, paste it into the Presentation Agent prompt and describe the deck structure. Specify slide count, any tables you want (net IRR, TVPI, DPI by vintage), and your preferred visual style.

7 Review the generated deck. Iterate on individual slides by typing follow-up instructions — 'make the portfolio table on slide 3 sortable by ownership percentage' or 'swap slide 2 and slide 5'.

8 Export the final deck to PDF for formal LP distribution or grab the shareable link for your LP portal if you're sending digitally.

9 After you send the brief, use the Email Triage app to monitor LP reply threads. It will flag inbound questions, draft replies pulling from the brief content, and remind you of unanswered LP emails after 48 hours.

10 Archive the completed brief and the meeting notes that fed it in your Knowledge Management workspace — next quarter, your drafting prompt can reference this quarter's update as a style and structure baseline.

11 Set a recurring Starch automation: every quarter-end Monday, pull the latest Plaid and Stripe sync data and generate a first-pass metrics summary to your inbox so the brief-writing process has a data anchor ready before you sit down to write.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

Q1 2026 LP Advisory Board Brief — March 31, 2026

Sample numbers from a real run

Fund net IRR (inception to date)	18.4
TVPI	1.31
DPI	0.22
AUM	52,000,000
Capital deployed this quarter	3,200,000
Dry powder remaining	11,800,000
Portfolio companies reporting revenue growth >20% QoQ	4
LP update prep time (this quarter vs. last)	-6

Meridian Ventures GP Sarah Chen runs a $52M early-stage fund with one associate and no dedicated ops staff. Going into Q1 close, she had notes from 11 portfolio founder calls (captured in Meeting Notes across January through March), Plaid-synced bank data showing $3.2M deployed in the quarter, and Stripe data from two SaaS portfolio companies confirming MRR growth. She typed a single prompt into Starch: 'Draft my Q1 2026 LP brief. Fund is at $52M AUM, net IRR 18.4%, TVPI 1.31, DPI 0.22. Pull highlights from my last meeting notes with Acme, Bridger, and Colosseum founders. Write a two-paragraph market commentary on private credit tightening and what it means for our portfolio's Series B timelines. Close with three 90-day priorities: finalize Fund II term sheet, host LP annual meeting, and close two follow-on investments.' The draft came back in under two minutes. She spent 25 minutes editing — correcting one IRR figure and adding a sentence about a portfolio company that had just signed a strategic partnership the day before. She then fed the brief into the Presentation Agent and got a 10-slide deck with a fund snapshot, four portfolio spotlights, a pipeline table, and a financials slide with net IRR, TVPI, and DPI. Total time from blank page to sent PDF: 52 minutes. Last quarter it took her two and a half days.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Net IRR and TVPI by vintage — the two numbers every LP asks first

DPI — especially for fund II fundraising conversations where distributions-to-paid-in signals realized performance

Capital deployed vs. dry powder — LPs want to know you're moving capital but not rushing

LP update turnaround time — not a metric you report externally, but internally it's a direct proxy for how much of your week goes to ops vs. investing

Portfolio company revenue growth rate (QoQ MRR or ARR) for SaaS-heavy books, or EBITDA delta for services-heavy positions

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Juniper Square

Purpose-built for fund administration and LP reporting, but starts at $50k+/year and assumes you have a dedicated ops team to configure and maintain it — not practical for a sub-$100M emerging manager.

Google Slides + Docs + manual data export

Zero cost and fully flexible, but the brief and deck are assembled manually every quarter — two to three days of GP time that compounds into weeks per year.

Addepar

Best-in-class portfolio analytics for multi-asset wealth managers, but priced and architected for RIAs and family offices with dedicated data teams, not a two-person emerging fund GP.

ChatGPT / Claude (standalone)

Good at drafting narrative prose, but has no live connection to your fund's financial data, meeting notes, or email — you're still manually copy-pasting every number and summary before it can write anything.

Notion AI

Excellent for knowledge management and light document drafting, but doesn't connect to Plaid or Stripe, can't generate a presentation deck, and has no email triage layer — you'd need four separate tools to replicate what Starch does in one workflow.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — presentation agent, meeting notes, founder inbox all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Is Starch SOC 2 Type II certified? My LPs will ask about data security before I connect fund financials.

Not yet. Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your LPs or compliance counsel require SOC 2 Type II as a condition of connecting fund data, that's a real constraint you should weigh. Starch's data practices are serious — your data isn't used to train models, connections use standard OAuth — but the formal certification isn't in place yet. It's on the roadmap.

Can Starch pull from QuickBooks if my fund's accounting firm uses it for the books?

Yes. Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule — invoices, bills, payments, vendors, and journal entries. One current limitation: QuickBooks report views (P&L summary, Transaction List, Vendor Expenses) are temporarily unavailable due to an upstream connector issue. Entity-level data syncs normally, so your brief can reference invoice and payment data, but you'd need to pull a formatted P&L manually from QuickBooks until that's resolved.

What if my portfolio companies use tools that aren't Plaid or Stripe — like a custom billing system or a niche ERP?

If the portfolio company has a web-accessible dashboard or report, Starch can automate reading it through browser automation — no API needed. You'd describe what data you want ('log into Acme's internal reporting portal and pull the MRR figure from the dashboard') and Starch handles the navigation. If they export to Google Sheets, Starch can connect to Google Sheets from its integration catalog and query it live.

The Presentation Agent is listed as 'currently in development' — what do I use in the meantime for the slide deck?

Request beta access through Starch to get notified when Presentation Agent launches. In the meantime, you can use Starch to draft the full exec brief text and talking points, then paste that into Google Slides manually or into any AI image-and-layout tool you already use. The brief-drafting workflow (Meeting Notes → Starch narrative → edits) still cuts your quarterly prep time significantly even before the deck automation is live.

Can I use this for the actual LP annual meeting presentation, or just for internal briefs?

Both. The exec brief workflow produces a document you'd circulate before the meeting; the Presentation Agent output is the deck you'd present during the meeting. Some managers send the brief as a pre-read and the deck as the meeting artifact. Others consolidate into one document. Starch builds whatever format you describe — tell it 'combine the brief narrative and the data slides into a single 15-page board book' and it will.

Does Starch store my fund's financial data permanently, or is it queried live each time?

For scheduled-sync providers like Plaid and Stripe, Starch stores the synced data in its own database on a refresh schedule — that's what makes it available instantly when you run a brief. For apps you connect from Starch's integration catalog (like Google Sheets or Airtable), data is queried live each time your app runs and is not stored persistently. Starch is not a long-horizon data warehouse — if you need years of historical archives with audit trails, you'd want a dedicated data store alongside it.