Read time: 7–8 min  ·  Author: Kasper-Tanakrit Sermsuksan

In 2004, Jeff Bezos sent a memo to Amazon's leadership team that effectively banned PowerPoint from senior executive meetings. Not recommended. Banned.

In its place: a six-page written narrative, read in silence at the start of every meeting. No slides. No bullets. No presenter standing at the front of the room doing the thinking on behalf of the audience.

The reasoning was simple and has never been improved upon: bullet points hide thinking. A well-constructed sentence cannot. A memo forces you to construct complete arguments, acknowledge complexity, and write in a way that another intelligent person can evaluate critically.

"Bullets let you hint at an idea. A sentence forces you to actually have one."

For a venture-stage team, the 6-Page Memo does something even more important. It forces you to understand your own venture.

What Amazon Actually Does — and Why It Works

At Amazon, senior leaders receive the memo before the meeting. They read it in silence for the first twenty to thirty minutes. Everyone arrives at the substantive discussion with the same depth of understanding. There is no warm-up, no context-setting, no one playing catch-up while the presenter builds the case.

The conversation that follows is about the substance. It is about what the memo argues, where the logic holds, where the evidence is thin, what is missing. The discussion is better because the document did the work it was supposed to do.

This is not a meeting efficiency hack. It is an intellectual standard. Writing a memo at this level forces the author to close every loop they had left open in their own thinking.

Bezos has described the experience of sitting in the reading room as one of the more honest signals a leader gets. A document that was not yet ready to be read becomes immediately obvious. A document that was solid becomes the foundation of a genuinely useful forty-five minutes.

The Six Pages — What Each Should Cover

Page 1 — The Problem and Why It Matters

State the problem clearly and make the reader feel its significance. Who has this problem? How widespread is it? What does it cost them — in time, money, frustration, or missed opportunity? What does the status quo look like for someone living with this problem?

This page should end with the reader thinking: this is a real problem worth solving. Not 'interesting,' not 'plausible' — worth solving. The specificity of the problem description is what earns that response. Vague problems sound like background noise. Specific ones land.

Page 2 — The Customers and the Evidence

Who specifically has this problem, and how do you know? This is where your field research lives. Not 'we surveyed the market' — who did you actually talk to, what did they tell you, and what pattern emerged across those conversations?

Real names (anonymized if needed), real quotes, real evidence of people experiencing the problem you described on Page 1. A strong Page 2 makes Page 1 undeniable. A weak Page 2 — one built on hypotheses about behavior rather than observed behavior — makes everything that follows feel shaky.

If your interviews revealed something you did not expect — a version of the problem you had not considered, a segment you had overlooked, a friction you had underweighted — Page 2 is where that appears. Evidence that surprised you is the most convincing kind.

Page 3 — The Solution

What are you building, and why is it a better answer to the problem than what currently exists? Be specific. Be humble. Describe what it does, what it does not do, and why the gap between the status quo and your solution is meaningful.

The most common mistake on this page: describing the product rather than the solution. A product is a thing. A solution is what that thing does for a specific person in a specific situation. 'A mobile app with AI-powered recommendations' is a product. 'A way for first-generation students to navigate scholarship applications without needing to know someone who went to university before them' is a solution.

Page 4 — The Business Model

How do you make money, from whom, at what price, through what channel? Include your best current understanding of unit economics — what it costs to acquire a customer and what that customer is worth over their lifetime.

Be honest about what you know and what you are still testing. 'We believe our customer acquisition cost is approximately X, based on early experiments, and we will confirm this by running Y over the next ninety days' is a stronger statement than a confident-sounding number that has no basis in reality.

One useful question to answer here: who pays, and who uses? In many ventures these are not the same person. A school pays for a platform that students use. A hospital pays for software that doctors use. Understanding who controls the purchasing decision versus who experiences the product is fundamental to the model.

Page 5 — The Plan

What are you doing in the next ninety days, and what would success look like? This is not a five-year roadmap. It is a clear, specific, credible account of your next move and how you will know if it is working.

The test of a good plan is this: if someone else read Page 5, could they execute it? If the answer is no — if the plan is too vague, too aspirational, or too dependent on things you do not yet control — rewrite it until it is specific enough to be actionable by someone other than you.

Page 6 — The Team and the Ask

Who is building this, and why are you the right people? Relevant experience, complementary skills, honest acknowledgment of gaps. If there is a critical function you do not yet have covered, name it — and name your plan to address it.

Then, the ask. Be specific. If you are seeking funding, state the amount and what it will be used for — not in general terms, but in specific allocations tied to specific milestones. If you are seeking a partnership, state exactly what you need and what you are offering. If you are seeking an advisor, say what kind of expertise you are looking for and what the engagement would look like.

The ask that cannot be acted on is a missed opportunity. The more specific it is, the more useful the response can be.

The Test — Read It Cold

The standard Bezos applied to Amazon memos was whether a reasonably smart person who knew nothing about the subject could read it and understand the argument. Not understand what the author meant — understand what the author actually wrote.

Test this yourself. Give your memo to someone who has never heard your pitch before — not a teammate, not a friend who has been following your journey. Someone genuinely cold. Ask them to read it without you explaining anything. Then ask them to tell you back what they understood.

The gap between what you intended and what they understood is your next edit. Do this three times before submission. The document you have after three cold reads is materially different from the one you had before.

What Makes a Memo Fail

Two patterns appear consistently in memos that do not work.

The first: writing it as a presentation script. Paragraphs that read as slide narration. Sentences that only make sense if you already know the context. Headers that do the work that arguments should be doing. A memo is a standalone document. It should be able to be read, understood, and evaluated by someone who was not in the room when you built it.

The second: writing for an audience that already knows the venture rather than someone who does not. Every sentence should be testable against the question: would a smart, skeptical outsider understand and believe this? If not, rewrite it until they would.

A memo that is hard to write is a venture that is hard to understand. Both problems have the same solution.

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A Note for GVP Students

Your 6-Page Memo is one of the five final deliverables due on Class 13. It is also — honestly — the most revealing one.

The pitch deck can be polished. The BMC can be filled in. The FISHE map can be formatted. But the memo cannot be faked. Either you understand your venture well enough to construct a complete written argument about it, or you do not. It shows.

Start with Page 2. Write down exactly who you talked to and what they told you. If that page is thin, go back and do more interviews before you try to fill in the rest. Everything in a strong memo flows from real evidence about real people. The Amazon standard is not unachievable — but it does require that you have done the actual work first.

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