Among smaller VC firms I’ve noticed there’s a spectrum. Some partnerships are very data driven, and some partnerships are more ad-hoc. I’ve seen examples of both that have great returns.
Now that access to AI makes it easier to look for insights in your own database, write reports to LPs, and probably other things I haven’t thought of yet, it seems more important than ever to be collecting the right data — but what data is the right data?
Aside from the financial and performance data on the portfolio itself, what data is important for a small, early stage VC firm to track in software? And what software should be used to track it?
It seems important to track:
The companies we consider for investment (A Deal Flow DB)
Maybe: the companies we didn’t consider for investment but should have!
The people we meet (A CRM)
The LPs who consider investing in our fund (A fundraising CRM — although maybe this is a subset of the CRM)
I’ve heard of firms using Airtable, Apollo.io, and Notion for these things. Most of the time Carta will be where the cap tables are kept.
If you’ve got experience with VC and startups, I’m curious what data you think is important, and what software you think should be used.
If you don’t have experience with VC and startups, but have some parallel experience, I’d be curious to know what you recommend.
Talking from the perspective of the startup. Aside from data points you mentioned (companies consider investing, people they meet) in the various granularity levels you can get, it's important for VCs to map/track their personal network (past colleagues, mentors, boss, industry point of contacts, etc) with the intention of leveraging it in favor of their startups. The richer that network, the more value the bring to the table aside from the money, and thus, the more attractive they become for startups.