SecondPen.aiTemplates · Operating cadence & reporting
Annual shareholder letter template
Origin: Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway letters; Jeff Bezos's 1997 Amazon letter.
Sections
- Scorecard
- What went well and badly
- Capital allocation
- Long-term principles
- Outlook
How a tough reader scores it
When you score a draft against this format, the Critic evaluates this shareholder letter. The weights add up to 100; the fixes for the weakest criteria arrive as cards in the editor.
| Criterion | Weight |
|---|---|
| Plain-English clarity for a non-expert owner | 20 |
| Candor about mistakes, with the author owning them | 20 |
| Capital allocation reasoning is explicit | 20 |
| Consistent long-term metric and principles | 15 |
| Teaches the reader something | 10 |
| Free of promotional language | 15 |
How it works in SecondPen.ai
Open the template and the editor writes the blank once, with a line of guidance under each heading that you delete as you fill it in. Write your abstract and the editor names the format it reads like. Ask for a document with a slash command and it offers to start from the matching format. When the draft is ready, the Critic scores it against the criteria above, the way this format's toughest reader would, and the three highest-leverage fixes become Editor cards.
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