Collecting KPIs from your portcos is great, but KPIs alone aren't that useful. Learn what inputs you need for more strategic analyses.

You had the best intentions when you bought Pitchbook, Sourcescrub, Harmonic, etc. You were expecting immediate insights when you signed up for a modern CRM like Attio or Affinity. You told yourself and your GPs that all you needed to do was hire a data scientist, spin up a Snowflake instance, slap an LLM on top of it, and then a herd of embryonic unicorns would prance onto your investors’ iPhone screens (because name one investor who still uses a laptop these days). You thought this was the roadmap to put your firm on the cutting edge of data-driven deal sourcing.

Birthdays are a time to reflect - on learnings, accomplishments, and goals – and the birthday of a business is no exception. Foresight recently turned 2. And by recently, we mean like three months ago, but we were too busy to celebrate (or to write a blog post).

The finance team at Menlo Ventures were looking for portfolio management software that gave the firm “a single source of truth” about portcos, funds, and the entire portfolio. They wanted all their data integrated into dashboards, workflows, and modeling tools so that they could get a “more timely pulse on the portfolio.” They wanted software that would show “what we hold and how it’s performing,” which meant unifying fund accounting, cap table, and KPI data and being able to easily slice and dice it. In their own words, they were looking for “the holy grail.”

It would be hard to find a private fund manager that isn’t at least thinking about what it means to be “data-driven” or “AI enabled” right now. If a firm has more than 15 or so people, there’s usually at least one investor or platform leader, motivated by curiosity and maybe a little impatience, who has taken the initiative to become an expert at using data, automation, and AI to find and diligence deals.