Data-driven VC #0: What to expect from this newsletter
Where venture capital and data intersect. Every week.
👋 Hi, I’m Andre and welcome to my weekly newsletter, Data-driven VC. Every Thursday I cover hands-on insights into data-driven innovation in venture capital and connect the dots between the latest research, reviews of novel tools and datasets, deep dives into various VC tech stacks, interviews with experts and the implications for all stakeholders. Follow along to understand how data-driven approaches change the game, why it matters, and what it means for you.
Why this newsletter?
Let’s start a few years back. When I first joined Earlybird VC as an intern in 2017, I had anything but a clue about what VC actually was. However, I had one clear - for me very obvious - expectation: Those who invest in and support the most disruptive businesses on our planet would certainly be most advanced in terms of processes, tools and tech stacks themselves. If you see and feel cutting-edge innovation day in and out, why wouldn’t you operate that way yourself? Well, to tell you I was disappointed on this one is probably a vast understatement.
In the beginning, I thought it was only Earlybird, but speaking to some peers at other firms I quickly realized that it was actually an overarching problem across the VC industry. In retrospect, having had Salesforce as a CRM system in 2017 made Earlybird actually stand out at that time. Anyways, the only “real” digitization that VC has ever seen was the transition from pen and paper to mouse and keyboard. Surprisingly, progress has stopped at the MS Office Suite (and Covid-induced video calls..) That’s (mostly) the state-of-the-art in VC.
So back to the initial question: Why this newsletter? Together with an ever-growing group of like-minded people, I made it my mission to push VC to the next level through real innovation. To overcome shortcomings from inaccessibility for underrepresented founders over biased, inefficient and manual decision-making processes to non-scalable, sometimes very limited value-add. I strongly believe that technology in general, but data more specifically, is here to disrupt VC as it did/does with any other industry.