A former data engineer moved into venture capital and found the industry stuck in the past: most firms still rely on PowerPoint and Excel instead of modern data tools. True data-driven investing would use AI and automation to reduce bias and make better investment decisions.
Chapters
I come off from a data engineering data science kind of background and when I randomly stumbled into VC I was really surprised how manual and inefficient all of the workflows were. So I couldn't believe back then that those people who backed the most visionary disruptive founders in the world still worked themselves like in the 1950s or mostly the same. I think one digitization step that happened in the industry is really from pen and paper to PowerPoint and Excel but that's really it. It was obviously data. Some people are like yeah why do we call it data driven? Of course we use data to inform our decision but when I think about data driven it's really leveraging modern data technology, modern data stack and then also AI more intelligent models and algorithms to first of all collect the data and then process the data to eventually get to a better decision to be cautious of biases to make sure you have all of the information available to make an informed decision and so.