Related: Summary Learning: The Investment Memo; Public Equity Investment Memo; Opportunity Canvasing
Similar to an investment memo, a deep dive is your overall thinking about a specific company or investment opportunity including your notes, models, and evolving hypothesis. The key difference between a memo and a deep dive is typically that a memo is meant to follow a specific structure that drives towards action; you read a memo and have an answer to the question "therefore, what?" A deep dive is a library of knowledge; there may not always be a resulting action but the reader will walk away significantly more informed on the topic.
The reason you create a deep dive is often after you have gone through the process of Opportunity Canvasing and have identified a key trend within a broader theme that is interesting. For example, your canvas might have led you to the e-commerce market and you read the statistic the total online sales have increased their growth rate from 9% to 30%+ in the first half of 2020. That is a trend that feels worth investigating. The more you investigate it you may develop a thesis like "if people are selling online they're going to need tools to help them do that." So you decide to investigate Shopify. Now Shopify becomes the subject of your deep dive. Your deep dive may be more broad like "E-commerce Technology Vendors" where you want to lay out the entire landscape.
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Creating a deep dive is an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of a specific company, and can be a valuable resource to some of these companies as well. The ability to correctly profile a company is a valuable skill for your own analysis and for the companies you work with.
There is a never-ending list of ways you can go about developing a deep dive. There also isn't always a clear outline for what is important until you immerse yourself in the content available. Here are some approaches you might take.