We’ve been outlining our vision for startup portfolio management over the past few editions of the weekly Outset blog. You can read about portfolio management being seamless here and the overarching vision here. Seamless, Effortless and Real Time are key words at Outset. Today we’re focusing on
Effortless
Let’s play the word association game. Effortless is to Portfolio Management as Relaxation is to Building the Ancient Pyramids. What happens once you invest in more than 10 startups? Well, if you’re a single investor you find your time is already getting stretched thin. If you are going to keep playing the law of averages, which you have to as a startup investor, you are going to need to start thinking about hiring a people to help you vet deals and manage your growing portfolio. The idea of investing in a few startups for fun suddenly starts to feel more like a business.
Portfolio management requires many inputs. Data from your portfolio companies, data from you, data from your accountant or controller. With those amounts of inputs you can really only obtain quarterly visibility into your full portfolio. You might be able to get monthly data on some companies, but the entire portfolio proves difficult as each company has a different schedule for delivering numbers and updates.
At Outset, we believe that is absurd. Coming from over a decade in institutional asset management, we believe portfolio management must be as frictionless as possible. You cannot make efficient decisions when you require inputs from so many. To achieve the best results portfolio management must be effortless.
But how do you make it effortless? Easy! You automate so that startup founders don’t have to think about inputs monthly or quarterly. You make it so you don’t have to chase founders & your controller doesn’t have to compile numbers all day long. Put simply you do what Outset does.
But the process can’t be effortless for you unless the data entry process is effortless for your portfolio companies as well. As an investor, you may have a beautifully-designed platform that can be accessed quickly, but if the startup isn’t able to easily provide you the data, without requiring consultants and additional staff, your problem won’t be solved.
As you know, startups want and need plug and play. If they are going to succeed, they need to streamline routine functions like these as much as possible. By providing them a piece of software that allows them to see all of their important metrics and manage their business in four clicks, never to be touched again, you have solved their problem and yours.
By now, you probably know that this is the very backbone of Outset. Our tool provides vital utility to startups and essential portfolio intelligence to you, all while decreasing the amount of work required by all parties by an order of magnitude.
The bottom line, as long as you are requiring inputs from multiple parties, your information will always be dated, resulting in lackluster results. Outset solves this startup portfolio management challenge. Stay tuned, it only gets better.
