Editorial
Editorial standards.
Almost nothing about a European venture fund is filed anywhere you can subpoena. That shapes what this site can state as fact, what it can only attribute, and what it declines to publish at all. This page sets out where the line falls.
What counts as a source here
European venture funds are mostly private partnerships with no US-style filing obligation, so the strongest available source is usually the fund's own published page, a public pension fund's commitment disclosure, or a national companies register. Named reporting and the deal databases come next. Candidate-reported material is used for texture and never as the sole basis for a number, and it is labelled as candidate-reported wherever it appears.
How a fund guide gets built
Research comes before prose, and it lands in a separate file: what the fund says about itself, what its team page shows, which programmes it has actually run, and where any of that is contradicted or undated. Only then is the article drafted, and it may not contain a claim that is missing from that research file with a source attached.
What the checking pass looks for
A second reader re-opens every citation and asks three things: does the source still say this, is the as-of date recorded, and does the sentence claim more than the source supports. Fund size, team headcount and portfolio counts get particular attention, because those are the numbers that go stale first and the ones a reader is most likely to repeat in an interview.
Corrections
Errors are fixed as soon as we find them or hear about them. The fix goes into the article itself and is noted at the foot of the piece with the date. Where an error would have misled someone materially — a wrong fund size, a programme that no longer runs — the note goes at the top as well. Report one to info@venturecapitalinterview.com with the URL and the claim.
The sources behind a venture guide
Roughly in the order we prefer them. Anything low on this list can colour a paragraph; it cannot carry a figure on its own.
- Fund-published pages: strategy, team, portfolio and programme pages, with the date they were read
- Public pension and endowment disclosures that name their venture commitments
- National company registers and regulatory filings where a fund is required to make them
- Named institutional reporting: Financial Times, Bloomberg, Sifted, Business Insider
- Deal and funding databases: PitchBook, Dealroom, Crunchbase, cited with an access date
- Accelerator and venture-programme materials published by the operator itself
- Candidate-reported accounts from career forums, always labelled as such and never load-bearing
AI disclosure
Large language models, Anthropic's Claude among them, are used here as drafting and organising tools. They turn a research file into a first draft and they help keep long articles internally consistent. No model output reaches the site untouched.
The line we hold is about responsibility rather than tooling. A published number is the editor's, and if it is wrong the fault is the editor's. Model output gets read with more suspicion than a source does, not less, because a model will produce a confident sentence about a fund it has confused with another one.
Where the boundary sits
Used for
- Turning a sourced research file into a first draft
- Proposing quiz questions for an editor to accept or reject
- Catching contradictions between sections of a long guide
- Rewriting a paragraph that reads badly
Never used for
- Supplying a fund size, a date or a headcount from memory
- Confirming that a source says what a draft claims
- Deciding whether a claim is safe to publish
- Anything that reaches a reader without an editor in between
Who stands behind this
Editorial direction sits with Nadia Brandt — a pen name the publication writes under. No fund, accelerator, search firm or training provider named on this site has any commercial relationship with it, and none has seen an article before publication. Where we point readers at an outside tool, including Finance Interview Prep, we do it in the body of a sentence and not for payment.
Questions about these standards or corrections: info@venturecapitalinterview.com