Earlier this year, I wrote about the consolidation of our external data stack at Earlybird and why we moved to Harmonic as our primary data backbone.

That piece closed on Scout and the argument that firms can now benefit from an agent that understands their network and scoring criteria and covers the entire market, without the years of engineering it took us.

Earlier this month, Harmonic made Scouts that run on a schedule available to everyone. That struck me as a window into how VCs are using agents and which tasks investors are willing to hand off at a regular cadence.

Our recent DDVC Landscape report shows the breadth of funds that run on Harmonic, which means Max Ruderman and his team can see across the market in a way none of us can from inside a single firm.

I asked Max for a guest spot in return for aggregate insights from that data, and he agreed. My hypothesis going in was that the jobs have not changed, but who does them has.

Over to Max.

Andre’s hypothesis holds.

The jobs are the same as they were 10 years ago. Funds source, watch markets, and monitor pipelines and portfolios, and all are impacted by agents.

Looking at aggregate information across thousands of scheduled Scouts, I was particularly intrigued by two findings:

Note: every query example below is written to show intent; none are real user data.

Let’s get to it.

55% of Scouts are some form of thesis-driven sourcing, where thesis is broadly defined as any theory about what to monitor for opportunities. They split as follows:

Vertical radars make up almost half of scheduled Scouts, reflecting investor ambition to cover everything relevant within their focus industries. Nobody has pushed that further than Flynn Seeger at Oyster Bay, who recently walked us through his expansive setup.

Flynn has one scheduled Scout per sub-sector inside their food and agtech thesis, covering GLP-1 alternatives, sports nutrition, probiotic sodas, cultivated meat and the rest. The Scouts totaled 37 when we spoke, and he’s working toward at least 50. They all feed a single master list after passing through the same pre-screening skill.

The master list has passed 2,000 companies, with 137 from something as niche as the sports nutrition Scout alone. Roughly 80% of what’s surfaced clears the screening skill, and what survives goes to the investment team as a weekly digest in Slack. Each company gets evaluated, and a “thumbs-up” sends an outreach to the founder and pushes the record into the CRM.

This type of screening is characteristic of many of the most valuable Scouts. Users who have codified their preferences can invest their time chasing priority opportunities instead of wading through long lists of results.

We’re best known for sourcing, and that certainly is where a lot of value comes for our customers. But users are now extending Scouts far beyond the first stages of the investment funnel. We identified repeated patterns across 3 categories in addition to sourcing. Market intelligence, tracking, and portfolio support.

Humans should not be wasting their time finding companies anymore. With your network, documented theses, scoring criteria and access to the entire market, agents can not only surface everything: they can also show you only what matters. 

Customers have found sharper ways to raise yield on their hours than we would ever have designed. A Scout surfaces scored targets on a schedule, then collaborates with the investor to reach conviction.

I agree with Andre’s sentiment that access to the firm’s own data and past decision context is the highest leverage missing piece for even more powerful automation.

Harmonic already interleaves CRM data, networks, and arbitrary custom data, and now we’re working on an even richer context graph.

That’s it for today.

Thank you Max & team Harmonic for sharing such unique insights. I hope these examples provide inspiration for our DDVC community - at least they did for me.

Stay driven,
Andre