Welcome to another edition of our Sunday “Resources” stream where we share our most valuable data & resources across four rotating formats:

For 1. and 3., we collaborate with best-in-class partners to ensure you get the highest quality data. For 2. and 4., we leverage our ever-growing product portfolio and share selective snapshots of the most sought-after resources from The Lab.

At the end of this post, you'll find a unique deep dive on “AI & Automation for Platform Teams” with Anna Ott (VP People at HV Capital), Jay Anna Harris-Theis (VP Portfolio Excellence at Earlybird), and Hari Kolam (Co-Founder & CEO at Findem).

✅ Build an MCP server for investors (with or without coding)

✅ 16 VC pitchdecks that convinced LPs to invest

✅ List of 312 family offices that actively invest

✅ The ultimate VC tech stack overview

✅ VC Co-Pilot for deal sourcing

✅ Startup graduation rates from one round to the next

✅ Top 30 tools for VC investors in 2026

✅ Building a single source of truth for investment firms

Access these and more resources like our Slack community, 100+ masterclasses, automation templates, Notion templates, AI copilots, and more via The Lab.

I'm excited to share one of the latest sessions from our monthly Virtual Roundtable series, which goes deep on how investment firms use AI and automation department by department. This time, we focused on platform teams together with our partner Findem.

Of all the functions inside a venture firm, platform is the least standardized. Many platform leads work as a team of one while the portfolio grows every year, which makes the function one of the most interesting test cases for AI in venture. I was joined by:

Anna Ott, VP People at HV Capital, who brings 26 years of HR experience and supports roughly 170 to 200 portfolio companies on talent as a team of one.

Jay Anna Harris-Theis, VP Portfolio Excellence at Earlybird, who advises our startups on talent, HR advisory, tech partnerships, go-to-market, and knowledge sharing as part of our Flywheel team.

Hari Kolam, Co-Founder & CEO at Findem, a two-time founder whose teams across Findem and Getro serve more than 700 VC and PE firms.

Their shared conclusion: AI now covers most of the standard advice, research, and benchmarking that used to fill a platform lead's week. What founders still call for is trust, context, and judgment, especially when things go wrong.

1. Decide what founders call you for, then pick one signal to track. Every firm in the session runs platform differently. HV Capital treats it as talent advice, we run it inside a larger Flywheel team at Earlybird, and Findem sees it as the function that makes a fund's network productive and distributable. At Earlybird, we track OKRs. HV Capital's VP People watches whether founders keep reaching out: “It's less about the hires and the volume. It's about the depth of the relationship.”

2. Turn your recurring advice into skills. Most founder questions on onboarding, comp, or performance reviews already have tested answers. Log your calls and transcripts so a skill can draft responses you curate in minutes. The workflow I'd copy first: a second skill that stress tests every new hiring plan against competitor hiring, talent supply, and comp, with Findem mapping the talent market. You go into the first founder call already knowing which roles are realistic and which need a headhunter.

3. Make judgment the service. Founders now pull benchmarks and market maps from Claude or ChatGPT themselves, and many send that output to their platform lead for a second opinion. Treat that review as part of what you offer, and put the hours AI saves you into the companies that need you most. At HV Capital, that means first-time founders at the earliest stage, where Findem's founder points out a VC's name gets replies the startup's own name often can't.

4. Hire and upskill your platform team for AI fluency now. Our DDVC Landscape 2026 placed platform teams in the middle on AI maturity, and the talent gap is wider still. According to Findem's data, only about 3% of roughly 7,000 VC platform and operating professionals list AI as a skill, while about 70% of job listings now require it. At Earlybird, we hire for people who experiment, build things themselves, and learn fast, which tells us more than any list of tools. Give your platform team time to build with AI, since most of them run lean and their portfolios keep growing.

5. Build an action layer on top of verified, first-party data. Agents are only as good as the data underneath them, and market benchmarks are a commodity anyone can buy. What sets a fund apart is data it owns or can verify: cap tables, founder agreements, and network relationship data, which the panelists have yet to see another firm solve fully. Findem's 3D People Graph is one option: it connects people, companies, and career history across 100,000+ sources, with profiles verified and refreshed over time. Point your own agents at it to find founders, source talent for portfolio teams, or map the warmest intro into a deal. Then choose how your team accesses it: skill, MCP, chat, or dashboard.

Here’s the link to the full roundtable discussion👇

Stay driven,
Andre