Data-driven VC: April Roundup
Where venture capital and data intersect. Every week.
👋 Hi, I’m Andre and welcome to my weekly newsletter, Data-driven VC. Every Tuesday, I publish “Insights” to digest the most relevant startup research & reports, and every Thursday, I publish “Essays” that cover hands-on insights about data-driven innovation & AI in VC. Follow along to understand how startup investing becomes more data-driven, why it matters, and what it means for you.
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Welcome to our monthly wrap-up episode where we’ll cover April’s most relevant content at the intersection of VC, startups, data, AI & productivity. I read it all so you don’t need to - here we go👇
INTERESTING RESEARCH & REPORTS📈
Is Founder Response Time Predictive of Future Success?
Adam Shuaib from Episode 1 ran the numbers:
They identified every startup in their CRM that they had exchanged 3+ emails with. This number was large enough to capture the median response time for each founder, but small enough not to bias the dataset.
Total of ~1500 startups from 2012-2020 raising a seed round. They didn’t analyse companies/emails after 2020 to ensure everyone in the analysis had enough time to raise further funding.
For each company, they identified the median founder response time (in hours) to the first three emails they had exchanged with them.
The metric for success is always difficult to pin down, but they opted for companies that went on to raise a future Series-A funding round (approx. 10% of dataset).
✈️ KEY TAKEAWAY
Founders that went on to raise future Series-A rounds responded TWICE as fast to emails as those that didn’t end up raising a Series-A.
SaaS Playbook From 0 to 30M ARR
The inaugural edition of the ChartMogul SaaS Growth Report has arrived, offering a treasure trove of insights into the growth trajectories of over 2,200 SaaS businesses. From zero to $30M in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and beyond, here are the key findings from the deep-dive analysis: