Data-Driven VC

Data-Driven VC

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Data-Driven VC
Data-Driven VC
Predicting Startup Success With Company Descriptions and a Fused LLM
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Predicting Startup Success With Company Descriptions and a Fused LLM

Combining Structured and Unstructured Data for Startup Screening

Andre Retterath's avatar
Andre Retterath
Sep 26, 2024
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Data-Driven VC
Data-Driven VC
Predicting Startup Success With Company Descriptions and a Fused LLM
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👋 Hi, I’m Andre and welcome to my newsletter Data-Driven VC which is all about becoming a better investor with Data & AI. Join 27,710 thought leaders from VCs like a16z, Accel, Index, Sequoia, and more to understand how startup investing becomes more data-driven, why it matters, and what it means for you.


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“VC is a Finding and Picking the Winners Game”

This statement might feel repetitive to the long-term readers among you as I not only pointed this out in the very first episode but in many other occasions too. Yet, it’s crucial to keep this in mind when critically rethinking the VC investment process. You need to start somewhere and focus is key.

Morten Sorensen (2007, “How smart is smart money”) found in his study that about 2/3 of the VC value is created in the sourcing and screening stages of the investment process.

Following this value-oriented approach, the majority of my early DDVC episodes were focused on the sourcing and the subsequent data processing stages.

Get 40% discount and access 180+ deep dive articles (like the ones below), automation templates, AI copilots, our database benchmarking, conference recordings, webinars, and a lot more via “The Lab”

  • Difference between human-centric and data-centric sourcing approaches

  • Make versus buy and the results of my startup database benchmarking

  • A list of alternative data sources and how to scrape them at scale

  • Entity matching and how to create a single source of truth

  • Feature engineering, missing data and how to make sense of it all

  • …

Get 40% discount

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