Part 2: Tech Stacks to Scale a VC Fund Efficiently

Published in

Alpaca VC

4 min readMar 30, 2021

Welcome to part two in our series on scaling with company stacks! Last week, we highlighted the best tools and resources for Founders and now it’s time to talk about growth for VCs.

Part 2

A strong company stack is your secret weapon to becoming a better investor. By using technology at every stage of the investment process, from sourcing to tracking portfolio KPIs, you’ll be more nimble and quicker to scale your fund.

Of course, the road to a good company stack starts with research. Take the time to identify and dig into what’s out there — much like you would any potential startup. Know them in and out and how they fit your fund’s needs (especially how they scale) before committing so you don’t deal with problems down the road.

Similarly, and I can’t stress this enough as a Head of Platform, don’t let a tool’s defined use stop you from seeing the possibilities. After all, 95% of VCs use software that’s not “built-for-purpose” to run their operations. Consider the gaps in your stack and determine if an existing product in your toolbox — or one you’re currently considering — can be utilized in a variety of ways to build on efficiencies.

How you structure your stack will depend on your company’s needs, but at Alpaca VC, here’s how (some) of our tech stack breaks down:

To track deals and manage founder, operator, investor, and LP relationships, we use Salesforce as our CRM. It’s a far more customizable solution than others out there. Others that I would check out include Affinity, Pipedrive, Streak, and Hubspot.
Slack is our go-to for communication between our team and founders. It’s a mainstay for a reason. We have a private slack channel between our team and Expert Network as well so we can share deal flow, recommend talent, and exchange resources.
We currently use Almanac as our one-stop shop that holds a lot of our resources provided to founders. To be honest, it’s exactly like Notion. Our hub includes templates and guides from finance to marketing, startup service discounts, ability to book sessions with our advisors, and more. With many of us remote, having shared documentation helps keep everyone on the same page. Many funds also use Airtable to organize their resources.
For storage and security needs, we utilize Dropbox. Simple file hosting at its best.
A combination of Quaestor and Carta is used to track portfolio KPIs. The former gives us a data-driven approach to portfolio KPI management while the latter helps us manage those valuations and investments. Quaestor is the new kid on the block, and I can’t stress enough how much we have loved them. You’re able to input custom KPIs for each portfolio company and keep track of their quarterly milestones easily. Others used are Iprio, Rundit, and Visible.
For careers and job listings within our portfolio, we use Getro. It helps us connect with the right talent, quicker. They also just released a talent pool aggregator, which could be helpful in finding talent for these open roles.
To fulfill those open job roles, we use Hunt Club. We also use this tool to discover relationships to people we would like to get in touch with. Think of it as a networking tool. Some VC funds like to work with recruiting agencies specifically or build out a recruiting team. I’m more in favor of the ladder as you get more attention on your portfolio companies.
We use Option Impact to pull compensation reports for these job roles to make sure our founders are budgeting appropriately and offering competitive salaries. These reports can inform you how to compensate someone based on stage of the company or amount raised as well.
MassMailer is the tool we use to send mass emails and drip campaigns. The reason we picked MassMailer was for its integration with Salesforce, as mentioned above. Other great ones if you do not need this functionality: Klaviyo, Mailerlite, Mailchimp, the list goes on for miles with these.
For social scheduling and analytics, Buffer is our go-to. This helps us schedule a months worth of content in advance and see what’s performing with our audience best. Other good ones are Sprout and Hootsuite.
Our website is up and running on Wordpress and our blog on Medium. The two classics. I would honestly recommend hosting your blog on your site, however, we were already pretty deep with medium. An onsite blog will increase your SEO and drive people to your site.
For deals and perks for your portfolio, my opinion is to build those relationships yourself. If you can get the best agencies to give discounts for your portfolio companies and yours only, that’s special. Though there are many startup service discount hubs out there that are public for use.
And finally, Zoom is our go-to for events and webinars. For public facing communications, it can be beneficial to go with what everyone’s familiar with. I like Hopin alot as well.

Want even more tool recommendations and are curious about what other VCs use? Check out these resources:

Part 2: Tech Stacks to Scale a VC Fund Efficiently

Part 2

How you structure your stack will depend on your company’s needs, but at Alpaca VC, here’s how (some) of our tech stack breaks down:

Written by Erica Amatori