How We Build Documents That Drive Decisions
A unified framework for every presentation, memo, brief, and report produced at OSS Ventures.Covers slide decks and written documents. Based on McKinsey, Morgan Stanley, and MBB standards.
AI ETIQUETTE — MANDATORY DISCLOSURE Every OSS document must display its AI Contribution Level: 25% | 50% | 100% This document: AI 50% — Human-directed, AI-drafted, human quality-checked Version 2.0 — April 29, 2026
PART I
Universal Principles
These rules apply to every document — slide deck or written prose — produced at OSS Ventures.
Every document produced at OSS Ventures exists to drive a decision. Not to inform. Not to decorate. Not to demonstrate how much work was done. If the audience walks away without knowing what to do next, the document failed. This standard applies to every deck, memo, board pre-read, field report, and client presentation that carries the OSS name. No exceptions, no matter how short or internal.
For example, this document aims at every reader deciding to apply strictly all the principles below.
This document codifies the methodology that top-tier consulting firms — McKinsey, BCG, Bain — and elite investment banks — Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs — have refined over decades. Their clients are CEOs, board members, and investment committees who make million-dollar decisions based on documents they might scan in ten minutes. Our audience is the same: industrial executives, LP investors, portfolio founders, and board members. We write for them, not for ourselves.
The core principles are format-agnostic. They apply identically whether the output is a 40-slide board pre-read or a two-page investment memo. Lead with the answer, not the process. One message per unit (slide or section). Source every number. Vary the rhythm. Match the format to the setting. Every principle below flows from these five commitments.
OSS Ventures is an AI-native organization. We use AI extensively to research, draft, structure, and produce documents. We are not embarrassed by this — we are proud of it. But intellectual honesty demands that every document we produce discloses the degree of AI involvement. This is not a legal footnote buried in the appendix. It is a badge displayed plainly on the first page or the title slide of every presentation, memo, and report.
The reasoning is straightforward. Our audience — executives, investors, board members — makes decisions based on the documents we produce. They deserve to know whether a human being exercised judgment over the content, or whether the document was generated end-to-end by a machine. Transparency builds trust, and trust is the only currency that compounds over time in our business.
| Level | What It Means | When It Applies |
|---|---|---|
| AI 25% | Heavy human rework of all storyline, strategy, and structure. AI contribution is primarily redactional: formatting, language polishing, layout execution. The intellectual architecture is human. | A founder writes the full storyline and key messages by hand, then uses AI to clean up prose, fix formatting, or produce the slides. |
| AI 50% | Human is in control and has performed the quality check. AI drafted content, proposed structure, or generated analysis, but a human directed the process, validated every claim, and approved the final output. | A team member uses Claude to draft a board pre-read, then personally verifies all data, rewrites action titles, checks storyline logic, and signs off. This is the most common level at OSS. |
| AI 100% | AI performed everything including data sourcing, analysis, structure, drafting, formatting. No substantive human quality gate applied beyond a cursory review. | An automated agent-generated report, or a first draft shared before any human review. Should be rare for external documents and must always be flagged. |
The AI contribution level must appear on the title slide or first page of every document. The format is: "AI [0% | 25% | 50% | 100%] — [one-line description]." For slide decks, place it on the title slide. For memos, place it on the first page below the title. For one-pagers, place it in the footer. When in doubt about which level applies, round up — it is better to over-disclose than to under-disclose.
This is a competitive advantage. When OSS walks into a boardroom and says "this analysis was AI-assisted, human-validated" while competitors pretend they did everything by hand, we signal two things simultaneously: we are honest, and we are operating at the frontier of how work gets done.