Dear Founders, Here Are My KPIs

Every day I meet with Founders and I ask them a variety of questions. While no two conversations flow in exactly the same way, I’m usually learning a lot about their background, their vision, their knowledge of the market they’re playing in and more. However, not a single meeting goes by in which I don’t ask them about what they perceive their KPIs to be and which ones they are tracking and/or focused on. Meanwhile, I don’t think a Founder has ever asked me what my KPIs are.

Last week I was sitting on a panel with a few colleagues and someone asked what questions Founders should ask a VC. Most people have read numerous articles on the topic and know to ask about follow-ons, process and to do diligence calls with portfolio companies, but I’ve never heard anyone just flat out ask “What are your KPIs?” But that’s what came to mind and that’s what I said. Because ultimately someone’s priorities can be derived from understanding what their KPIs are. That’s why we ask Founders that question and that’s why Founders should ask VC it too.

Over the last 18 months since I started in venture I’ve tried my hardest to learn how other VCs perceive success outside of returns and how they can shrink the feedback loops in an industry where they’re extremely long. While strong returns are ultimately the top KPI for a “successful” VC, I recently crystalized exactly how I currently view my mine. Although I don’t track every single one of them, I do keep track of half of them and plan to implement processes to keep track of the others. With this piece I’m hoping that I give Founders and my VC peers an idea of where my priorities are at today as a young investor.

Portfolio Company Founder NPS*

I initially joined this industry for four reasons, the top one of which was to add value to Founders. The unique part of identifying your NPS score with portfolio company Founders is that it will include both the companies that are doing well and those that aren’t. Fred Wilson has discussed sticking with struggling companies and I think that it’s a powerful thing to have portfolio companies that are struggling, and perhaps not even getting follow-on capital from you, to recommend you to other entrepreneurs.

Further, just because you’re an investor with strong returns it doesn’t mean that you’ll score highly (9–10) on the “How likely is it that you recommend me as an investor to another Founder?” question. I fundamentally believe that this is the #1 KPI for me at the moment and am in the process of collecting the actual score. It’s a KPI that directly correlates with all the other KPIs that come below and tells me whether or not I’m doing the most important part of my job well: Supporting Founders.

*To me, every VC should track their net promoter score and publicly display it.

Number of Business Development and/or Partnership Intros

I’m not technical, I’m not a product manager and I’m definitely not the smartest person in venture. However, since I started working in business I’ve always prided myself on finding introductions to people that I needed to get in touch with. Therefore, every time I onboard a company at Corigin I ask them to share a list of prospects that they have, which I can go to work on. I focus on this exercise usually for only the first couple days after on-boarding, but we’ve recently also had our portfolio company BD teams add us on LinkedIn from Day 1 so they are able to identify potential mutual connections that we can be helpful with (thanks to jason raziano). Ultimately investors are usually only as helpful as you want them to be, but I can certainly work on being more proactive about asking for new/updated prospect lists as time passes.

Number of Media/Press Intros

The other day I was chatting with one of my best friends in venture, Jason Fielder, and we were discussing the importance and value add of PR strategies post raise (note to founders: he’s really good at thinking about this). Relationships with tech writers and the media can be a funny thing. Luckily, I enjoy hanging out with a variety of writers/people in the press as I think it provides me with a unique perspective on things outside of the traditional Founder or VC mentality. I find meeting with these people on a regular basis doesn’t only add value to our portfolio companies when they are looking to get written about, but I can also add value to other Founders in the ecosystem looking for a press mention or to writers who would not have had any idea of the impending story otherwise. Moving forward I’m aiming to diversify my network of people in the press to include experts on certain topics, people at various outlets and writers that have a strong opinion opposite of my own.

Number of Intros/Successful Hire Ratio

Increasing the probability of success for a company boils down to hiring and how strong the team is. Hiring is one of the hardest jobs in the world and certainly one that takes up the most time. While we don’t have a full-time platform person and I don’t naturally have the strongest network of potential high level hires being a 25-year-old, I made it a priority of mine this summer to meet/get introduced to early employees of high growth startups, engineers and PMs that could be potential great fits for our companies. Although meeting these people is great, it’s even more important to me that a high percentage of these people that I introduce to our companies end up becoming “successful hires.”

# of Investor Intros and Conversion Percentage

Fundraising sucks. It’s my goal to make this as easy as possible by helping out with pitch decks/storytelling, putting together a strategy for fundraising and eventually making introductions. My colleague David Goldberg did an awesome job of outlining our strategy for an efficient fundraise, but one thing we made a priority in my first 12 months at Corigin was building out relationships and a database of potential Seed, Series A and growth investors. By learning what each investor was looking for specifically, we’ve looked to improve the efficiency of the fundraise by making more curated introductions. If all goes well, the Founder can spend less time looking for intros, less time fundraising and more time building their business.

Co-Investor NPS

While we’ve led a few deals at Corigin, often times we’re following onto rounds as part of a syndicate. As a firm that doesn’t have to go out and raise outside capital, we decided to implement a mandate in which we need to be able to add value to the Founders before agreeing to making the investment. Thus, even though we’re not always the largest check, I’ve looked to make it a priority to spend time with every company that I’m the primary point of contact with at Corigin, as well as our co-investors in them. Since joining 18 months ago I’ve had the pleasure of working with great co-investors, including: Ryan Moore at Accomplice, Peter Blacklow at Boston Seed, Jere Doyle at Sigma Prime, Annie Kadavy at CRV, Jeff Berman at Camber Creek, Melissa Krinzman at Krillion, Chris Pallotta at Raptor, Bill Guttman and more. Although I don’t plan to survey them, I’d like to believe that them making intros to me to other companies they’re looking at or investing in, is a good sign.

Number of Founders that I “passed on” who make intros for me in the future

Passing on a company is never fun and even when I pass I look to give guided feedback and hopefully add value to the Founder. While sometimes that value can come in the form of things to address with other investors, other times it can include introductions to investors who the deal may be a better fit for, introductions to potential hires or more. David Frankel from Founder Collective told me once that one of the most important things to him in venture is that every Founder has a genuinely good experience with him and one measure of that is whether or not they send companies your way even after passing. A few months later Semil, Adam Besvinick and I went back and forth about this on twitter and it’s something that I’ve been very thoughtful about since starting at Corigin.

Average Number of Blog Post Views and Average Monthly Website Bio Views

Venture is about returns, but when you’re new to venture it’s also about relationships, building your name and building your brand. In a business with very few quantitative data points (or ones that are difficult to track), I’ve needed to give myself additional benchmarks that I can actually look at. The core reason I blog is to get my thoughts on paper, but I’ve seen that the number of views directly correlates with the number of people reaching out, including: Founders, people working in the industry I’m writing about, other investors, etc. Because prioritizing time spent on various activities (blogging, meetings, panels, reading, etc.) is so important, I’ve felt like it’s important to keep an eye on the only quantitative analytics with a larger sample size.

Number of Deals Seen/Month

A huge part of our job as seed stage investors is sourcing. The quality of deal flow is the real priority, but I think that the amount of deals you see a month is indicative of the strength of your brand. Usually the best deals come from portfolio company founders, other VCs and different people in our network, so the more this grows through a variety of strategies, the better.

Number of “Partner” Conversations/Month

Venture is an interesting industry and it’s tough to create a pool of mentors that are VCs in the same way that you may create a pool of CEO mentors if you were a Founder. As a result, a lot of young VCs have turned to other outlets like the 20 minute VC to learn a great deal. While I’m an avid listener (shoutout to Harry Stebbings), I also find it very helpful to pick the brains of veteran VCs personally. From seeing multiple economic cycles to watching companies go public or getting acquired for massive valuations, these people have seen it all and it’s great to learn from them. Each VC has a different perspective and way of evaluating startups, so I find it valuable to learn what types of questions they ask, how they like to run board meetings, the best ways to communicate with Founders and more. Plenty of other benefits come with those relationships as well and you never know what they’ll lead to.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that some of these will change over time as my role/relationship with Founders continues to evolve with the stage of company that they’re in. However, for the stage of my career that I’m in today I’d say that those are my priorities and the things that I’m keeping the closest eye on in terms of success without knowing how a lot of these investments are going to pan out.

Are you a VC or Entrepreneur? If so, I’d love to hear your thoughts or share your own KPIs with me. Tweet at me @BoatShuman and lets get the conversation around Venture Capitalists KPIs going.