- CALL
- Not yet written
- DATE
- September 3, 2026
- WHY
- Not yet written
- LOST
- Not yet written
- CURRENCIES
- Not yet written
- TRIPWIRES
- Not yet written
- REVIEW
- Not yet written
The Call Memo generator
Write the memo before you make the call.
A decision you have not written down is a decision you will re-litigate forever. Fill in the seven fields. Get a memo you can hold yourself to.
Write your Call Memo
Why written beats remembered
The case for writing the call down is not discipline for its own sake. Memory rewrites the call after the outcome arrives. It is a motivated historian: it doctors the evidence in your favor, backfills reasons you did not have, and deletes the warnings you ignored. Six months from now, the version of the decision that lives in your head will be the version that flatters the result.
The memo is the version of you that decided, preserved. What you knew, what it cost, what would reopen it, dated and fixed. Hindsight cannot argue with a dated document. An unwritten bet is infinitely renegotiable by the person who made it. A written one leaves exactly one honest move when the numbers come in against it.
The fields do the interrogating
Each field forces a question most founders skip. CALL forces one sentence a stranger could not misread. WHY forces the reason, not the pros list. TRIPWIRES forces you to name, in advance, the conditions under which you were wrong. REVIEW forces a date when the call gets graded instead of remembered.
LOST is the one that gets skipped most, and it is the one doing the most work. A memo with an empty LOST field is a press release, not a decision. If the call cost you nothing, it was not a hard call, and the review two quarters from now cannot tell whether you chose well from a real set or rubber-stamped the only idea in the room.
Call Memo questions, answered
What is a decision memo?
A one-page record of a decision, written at the moment of deciding: what you chose, why, what it cost, and the conditions that would reopen it. Kahneman's single recommendation to any decision-maker was a decision journal kept at the moment of deciding, because hindsight quietly rewrites what you knew, and once it does, you cannot learn from your own record.
What should a founder decision memo include?
Seven fields at minimum: the call in one sentence, the date, reasoning a stranger could reconstruct the call from, what the decision cost you, the currencies it spends and protects, the tripwires that reopen it, and the review date when it gets graded. The field that separates a memo from a press release is LOST. If nothing goes there, nothing was decided.
How is a Call Memo different from an investment memo?
An investment memo argues a stranger into writing a check. A Call Memo holds you to a decision you already own. Search for a decision memo template and most of what you find is the first kind: a persuasion document, built for an audience. The Call Memo has an audience of one, the future you who will be tempted to relitigate, and its job is to make the decision stay made.
When should I write the memo, before or after deciding?
At the moment of deciding, not after. Written before or during, the memo records what you actually knew. Written after the outcome, it records what you wish you had known. And once the memo is written, deciding is over: reopening without a tripped wire or genuinely new evidence is relitigating, a tax you pay every morning for a purchase you already made.
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