Taylor Davidson · Portfolio Reporting

In 2024 I wrote a bit about what I enjoy about using AI tools to build things:

What I enjoy most about using AI tools like ChatGPT is that they expand the range of what I want to figure out. The simple viewpoint to AI tools is that they automate things that existing technology and people do, and thus replaces the things that exist today. I prefer to operate with a viewpoint towards expanding resources rather than allocating resources, and so I look at AI tools as expanding the range of things we can do. Not just faster or cheaper or incrementally better, but substantially additive to what exists today. And to be even more nuanced about it, it’s not just what we can do, but what we want to do. Yes, using AI technology enables me to do more things, but what’s most valuable to me is how the process of using it expands my ambitions for what I want to create.

Two years later and now we live in the age of custom software, where it’s become not only possible but possibly more efficient and cheaper for many users to create software customized for themselves rather than buy a solution off the shelf.

That leads me to my latest product, a platform for portfolio tracking and reporting for venture capitalists and angel investors, based on my experience on the investing and operations side of working with venture funds for years.

Venture investing has tended to be a boutique, manual business, hard to productize in terms of sourcing investments, working with portfolio companies, managing limited partners, dealing with the specific requests and analyses that come from all sides. You’re always catching up, trying to process the unstructured business of running an early-stage venture firm. Venture is operationally hard to streamline because the things that are easier to automate are often the places where being able to make human decisions bring the most value. It is a people business at the end of the day.

The key is to find areas where we can streamline and automate. Systems to deal with disparate data and inefficient reporting processes by portfolio companies. A more efficient solution than the maze of spreadsheets and portals with records of portfolio companies, investments, limited partners, and up-to-date metrics, a task challenging enough that we can only do it infrequently when needed.

So I built a platform to help venture capitalists and angel investors with their internal operations:

• Make portfolio reporting easier: forward founder updates in any format, and AI identifies the company, extracts the metrics, and builds an analysis.
• Make investment performance easier: update your schedule of investments with new deals and new valuations, and see your performance by round, company, sector, fund, and total company, instantly.
• Make value-add reporting easier: forward your emails with founders containing intros, hiring assistance, fundraising assistance, and more, and let AI parse and track our value-add over time.
• Make limited partner reports easier: consolidate limited partner positions across entities, fund administrators, SPV platforms, and your existing spreadsheet tracking tools into a central source of truth.
• Make compliance easier: keep a dashboard of required compliance events available to see anytime, bringing clarity to the compliance process to you and your team.

Combine the structured data with notes - a place for you and your team to log notes and conversations about your portfolio and funds - and an Analyst - an always-on AI tool to help answer your questions about company performance, industry insights, benchmarks, and research outside of your company - and the goal is help you spend less time building data and more time understanding it. Board prep without the scramble. Quarterly LP letters without the data gathering marathon. Spotting a company slipping before the founder has to tell you. A living view of the portfolio instead of a snapshot you take when you have time. ^[1]

Try the demo or see it on GitHub. Deploy it on your servers for free ^[2], or get my help deploying and managing it for you on your own infrastructure. If the technical lift for deploying it yourself is too much, sign up for the hosted solution. Need help beyond just aggregating the data, and I can work with you as a fractional CFO.

It’s a great time to be facilitator of insights, and I’m looking forward to seeing how this evolves. Questions, contact me anytime.