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SURPRISING OUTCOMES YOU CAN ACT ON IMMEDIATELY
1. Founders and VCs that go the distance together have the greatest capacity
To go the distance, founders need to go beyond their previous functional specialties, no matter what they were (technical, marketing, management). That means they have to continuously get a grasp on a growing collection of complex relationships very quickly. If they don’t, they will get replaced and although it may prevent a loss on the portfolio company, it could very well represent the loss of a blockbuster return.
In the same way personal PCs/integrated circuits originally opened the technical door for venture funded companies to entire industries, living dashboards can potentially act as a doorstop for a founder/VC partner team. That is, they keep a mental door open for decision-makers to see how their runway can be extended or if their rate of climb should be accelerated.
2. Most core metrics for progress in Fortune 500 and VC 5,000/Angel 15,000 companies are in a foreign language even the interpreters don’t understand: finance
The diagrams and charts used in Fortune 500 dashboards are an ideal alternative to thousands of textual descriptions (notes to calculations and financial statements) that are more complicated than the numbers they attempt to explain. However, remember, these multinational firms need to distill massive amounts of data within the context of earnings per share (EPS). A high-growth firm with meaningful earnings is rare. These early stage ventures have a comparable, or arguably a greater number of, variables but the context is one of progress driven value. As uncertainty wanes, customer acquisition initiates the first glimpse into positive operating cash flow and consistent earnings. As a result, EPS driven charts are not the most relevant outputs of a dashboard. Simply being able to see the impact of all of those numbers on a specific person you care about (a VC fund, the founder, the key management team, an angel, etc.) within a context your needs define would represent a tripling of founder management capacity. Being able to share, collaborate and track those analyses would further expand capacity gains.
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3. Upon completion, a true venture dashboard is usable by literally anyone in an organization with a middle school education or above. If they can change a date, they can generate previously inaccessible or prohibitively expensive insights in seconds.
On page 2 of this whitepaper we made a promise: By the 5th page of this whitepaper a founder, venture partner, CFO or analyst with a vision of marquee outcomes will visualize the world of key data lying dormant on their team’s server, desktops, favorite websites or email files waiting to be transformed into multiple “electronic” team members. Fig. 4, below on the left illustrates just a handful of the data your fund’s portfolio company, or your company, has in an email file, spreadsheet or PDF that would probably take you the better part of afternoon simply to read. Fig. 5 Illustrates how a founder, investing partner, or any other person within your team, can use a venture dashboard created with just one of the many documents in Fig. 4 to instantly generate 1MM+ insights none of the parties in Fig. 4 have previously had accessed to.
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