Another year has flown by, and Data Driven VC just turned four. What started as a few articles shared amongst friends has grown into a global community and platform for private market investors with 120k+ followers across socials and 40k+ email subscribers.

Staying true to my "building in public" mantra, I want to continue the series of anniversary posts (see year 1 here, year 2 here, and year 3 here) and use this post to reflect on the fourth year, share the wins and struggles along the way, and open the curtain on what's next. Expect plenty of learnings, frameworks, and resources you can apply right away, plus some fresh perks and discounts.

.. I will share a detailed behind the scenes look at the evolution of Data Driven VC across our five pillars 1) Newsletters, 2) Reports, 3) Events, 4) Products, and 5) “The Lab”, and highlight what is in for you.

Let’s dive in!

Today marks the 479th edition, split across 3 weekly formats:

I started on Medium in 2018, moved to Substack in September 2022 to own the direct relationship with my audience, and last year migrated DDVC to Beehiiv after watching Substack quietly convert email subscribers into in-app followers instead of loyal readers.

Beehiiv delivered what Substack couldn't: full audience ownership, deeper analytics, an open API, and an automation suite that's grown fast over the past few months. New tools and automations let us segment readers by actual behavior instead of running the same sequence for everyone, which is exactly the kind of features we'd been handling manually before. Less manual work for us, and content that reaches the right reader at the right time.

This spring, we launched the fourth edition of the Data Driven VC Landscape, covering unique data from 345+ investment firms, their tech stacks, budgets, teams, and more.

For the first time this year, we have a deeper understanding and classification of Data Driven VCs: Fullstack Builders & Workflow Builders.

‍Workflow VCs build their own automations without dedicated engineers.

Fullstack VCs build data infrastructure and internal tech stacks with dedicated engineers.

The median DDVC runs $500M AUM with 15 employees and 1 engineer. Fullstack firms skew larger ($800M AUM, 23 employees, 2 engineers) than Workflow firms ($151M AUM, 7 employees, typically no dedicated engineer) - but both maintain roughly one engineer for every five investors, a ratio holding steady regardless of fund size.

Becoming more data-driven in VC offers a clear edge - but the how matters just as much as the why. That's why we've mapped the real tech stacks DDVCs are building with: featured and most-used tools across data, CRM & portfolio management, productivity, agents & automations, and infrastructure.

We’ll launch the survey for the 2027 edition by the end of this year. Stay tuned!

While content was the beginning of DDVC, our community wants to learn and build together. Virtually and IRL.

Therefore, we’ve doubled down on events and hosted:

… and while year four is over, 2026 isn’t ;)

We still have lined up:

Year three was about turning the best tools, templates, and workflows from our community into public resources: we launched prompt libraries, VC skills & MCPs, VC Tool Finder, automation templates, Notion templates, limitedpartnerlist.com, venturecapitaldata.com, and lots more.

The feedback has been strong. Very strong. But the more resources we launched, the more we’ve heard that it had become increasingly difficult to find what you were looking for. So as step one, we launched vcstack.com as a directory to easily search, find, and access our resources.

Fast forward to today, a world where dashboards disappear and everything has become MCP and chat-native, we take the next step and are excited to launch DDVC Bot - the single search layer across everything DDVC has to offer: research, workflows, templates, and immediate answers to your questions instead of digging through 1000+ Slack messages, 500+ deep dives, or 100+ recordings yourself. It’s free .. ;)

While DDVC Bot finally solves the search and discovery bottleneck by providing you a tailored answer to your specific question and situation, The Lab aims to be the single place where you can access all you need to run a modern investment firm.

We’ve launched the first version about two years ago on a white-label platform called Mighty Networks. Although we quickly crossed the 100 member mark, the feedback here was more mixed than for the individual products.

For example, we weren’t able to integrate with Slack (community) or Beehiiv (newsletter), which meant we had to guide our members back and forth across platforms. Different logins, authentication management,… bad UX and lots of blocked accesses. Not great. We tested alternatives like Circle or Beehiiv’s new platform - in short, same same but different.

Given the value proposition resonated well but the delivery via a white-label platform didn’t, we decided to build it ourselves.

Today, after months of hard work, we’re launching the new DDVC Lab experience.

Explore The Lab and see what's new:

The new Lab is in Beta, and it's the first in a series of upgrades to our products and resources. Your feedback shapes what comes next, so tell us what you think.

Year one was about starting the newsletter and spotting adjacent opportunities to create even more value for our growing community. The DDVC Landscape report was the first step on this journey.

Year two was about expansion and launching further initiatives. We added Tuesday "Insights" and Sunday "Picks" to the newsletter, launched the second edition of the DDVC Landscape as well as the database benchmarking report, hosted the first Virtual DDVC Summit, created "The Lab" as a hub for our community, and launching a range of products in beta.

Year three was about doubling down on what worked well, cutting what didn't, and setting DDVC up for future success and scale. That meant rebuilding the foundation, adopting new tools, creating automations, best practices, documentation, and more.

Year four was about consolidation. Instead of adding more, we brought everything we and our community built across the years into one place. DDVC Bot to find what you’re looking for and The Lab to access everything you need in one place.

Now that our knowledge base is finally consolidated, year five is about scaling and bringing the community together to learn from each other and build. Expect hackathons that get members building side by side and a growing product library as a result thereof.

Last but not least, I can't miss the opportunity to say thank you to everyone who got us here.

Georgiy and Maryama, you helped run DDVC 24/7, the newsletter, reports, backend, automations, events, and community, all of it. Without you, none of this would be possible. Felix, thank you for partnering on the DDVC x Bits & Pretzels Investor Track. We’ll make this the leading GP x LP event in Europe. To every speaker who got on stage or behind a screen this year, thank you for skipping the polished version and telling us what's actually working. To our partners and sponsors, thank you for backing us and bringing our audience real value instead.

And to the DDVC community, you read, replied, showed up to events, and told us when something wasn't working. Everything we built this year exists because you kept showing up for it.

Four years ago, DDVC was a few articles shared with friends. Four years later, it’s a community building the future of venture together. We’re just getting started.

Stay driven,
Andre