Data-driven VC Landscape 2023 - Invest smarter, not harder: Insights & Tools from 150+ VCs

Hi Product Hunt, I’m Andre, the author of Data-driven VC and Partner at Earlybird Venture Capital. Wanted to share a bit of history of why I thought something like the Data-driven VC Landscape should exist and how it came to be 🤓 As an engineer by training, I spent over 5 years automating production processes and predicting machine failures using anomaly detection before stumbling into VC. When I started my internship in the industry, I was excited to work with the smartest and most ambitious minds across our portfolio companies, LPs, and own team. However, I was shocked at the manual, inefficient, and biased way the job was done. The only transformation the VC industry had seen was from pen and paper to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It was incredible how such talented people wasted their time and resources with repetitive monkey work. This experience led me to pursue a PhD on the topic of “Machine Learning and the Value of Data in Venture Capital” to understand if and how this opaque industry could be digitized. After countless experiments and more than a hundred VC interviews, I built the first prototype of our data-driven sourcing and screening platform at Earlybird. While I was excited about the project, I didn’t have enough time as an investor to develop a proper solution that could be used by my other colleagues without coding skills. As a result, we hired our first full-time engineer and grew the team to 7 world-class developers as of today🚀 Throughout this journey, I connected with many like-minded people in similar positions at other firms. Surprisingly, we had different ideas for varying parts of our investment processes, yet the exact same pain points: * What are the most important data sources? * Which parts of the tech stack should we buy, and which components should we develop ourselves? * How can I convince the partners to allocate a budget? * How can we hire the right people for such a project? * How can we incentivize our investors to adopt new tools? The fact that so many like-minded people were sharing the same challenges eventually led me to start the Data-driven VC community. Being a big believer in open-source, my hypothesis was that if I give something useful to the world, it will come back 10x. Following the great feedback on my Data-driven VC newsletter, I decided to take the next step and create the most comprehensive report on the state of digitization in venture capital. After months of hard work and contributions from more than 250+ peers 🙏🏻, sharing the first episode of this report is a HUGE milestone for me: https://landscape2023.datadriven... * 151 data-driven VC firms * 65 thought leaders * 400+ tools for modern investors * Hands-on guides to leverage AI without coding skills, integrate ChatGPT, build your own scalable web crawlers, and a lot more I’m absolutely thrilled to hear your feedback and continue growing our amazing community. Thank you for your support and stay driven! Andre

Huge congrats on the launch of this report! I'm all about data and productivity, and it's fantastic to see Andre "walk the talk" for the VC industry. Also excited to see how investors automate their work! This will become the go-to resource for investors who want to become more productive and data-driven in venture! It also has some super cool pointers to cool tools you can use to automate your workflows (including bardeen.ai and others) Just wondering what were your biggest surprises when going thru this?

Excellent, as a frequent Data driven VC reader, I really enjoyed reading DDVC's landscape report, it provides insightful & helpful resources .

Andre does the best research of anyone in this space full stop. True legend.

🚀 Kudos to the team behind this report for their meticulous research and for putting together such a valuable resource. Can't wait to see how this evolves with future iterations! Keep up the great work!

Super interesting! A good initiative.

@andre_retterath your background makes you uniquely positioned in the cross segment between machine learning and venture capital. Appreciate you putting out this report to help provide insights into the inevitable changes that will occur in the venture capital industry... like most other industries, AI/ML will disrupt. There are a lot of valuable platforms to help VCs use to optimize their decision-making, sifting through deal flow, capital raising, & relationship building.

Fantastic report! Congratulations on the launch. It has been quite enlightening and satisfying to know other VCs who are trying to crack the nut as well, and that many of our thesis and ideas are being shared by others. Investing in and hiring an analytics team at first seemed adventurous, risky (and expensive). Now we know it is an imperative and we are glad we did it. Your report reinforces our learnings! Thank you for showcasing all the VCs doing something similar, we should now try to connect more closely and interact with each other. Why not create an association?

Amazing research and cool tool recommendations! :)

Excellent Report and databases. I have been in quite some discussions lately that have been focusing on increasing VC productivity as well as reducing knowledge debt as individuals with accumulated knowledge leave and move firms. Congratulations on the launch 👏 Great follow up resource materials on the newsletter.

Exited to crunch through the DDVC’s report - Impressive and very insightful. Thanks to Andre and team for sharing their great work

Amazing initiative! The report is really illuminating, and very beautiful 😻 too! I’d love to hear about some common workflow that are repetitive and that you actually automate

I highly recommend this Data-driven VC Landscape report. It offers invaluable insights, with 400+ tools and practical guides, for navigating the digitization of VC. A must-read! Kudos to Andre!

Me likey. Very much so.

Invaluable research. Must read.

Super well thought out and in depth on how to implement truly data driven VC processes - at the forefront of what’s possible!

Great work Andre! I love your collaborative approach and sharing your knowledge with the community. Keep up the good work!

Amazing work Andre! Keep on going! True value for the ecosystem.

Wow, great work Andre! You're really leading the charge in the data driven world we're all living in.

Great work Andre.