How the Susa Ops Team engaged 84% of the Susa portfolio in 2020

And why we started tracking it.

By Natalie Arora, Head of Operations & Rachel Coffman, EA & Operations

At Susa Ventures, we believe that entrepreneurs are the lifeblood of progress, and we exist to help them realize their visions for a better world. This mission statement gives us a deep purpose; to strive to be the most accessible and supportive early-stage investor.

To accomplish this, we make our entire team available as a resource to every Susa founder, and we also leverage the extended Susa Family ー a deeply connected community of founders, investors, partners and advisors, to support our portfolio founders and their teams.

Our small but mighty Ops Team (Natalie & Rachel) work to build scalable (and sometimes very un-scaleable 🤪) systems and programs to support Susa founders and their teams.

Sharing a sneak peek at the Susa Founder Journey and our current program offerings below:

At the beginning of 2020, we started measuring the Ops Team’s efforts for the first time and set a goal of having direct touchpoints with 75%+ of Susa’s portfolio companies, as a starting place. We capture data for each valuable touchpoint, including participation in Community Events (ex. our educational Susa Bootcamp series, intimate peer Family Dinners) and any time we provide Tactical Support (ex. intro to a service provider, knowledge/resource share).

Next, we took a look at what success meant. Are these touchpoints of high quality, and how can we improve the founder experience once we have that answer?

By answering these questions, we are better able to connect founders who have similar needs, are at similar stages, running companies in specific sectors- and work to build a community around them. We want to be the most founder-friendly firm, but we realize we cannot do that without first connecting with our founders on a human level as we work to identify their needs.

Over the course of 2020, our Ops Team was able to directly engage 84% of Susa companies, exceeding our goal of 75%+. As a team of 2 supporting a portfolio of 100, we are really proud to have achieved this, especially during a year of so much uncertainty. But we also don’t over-celebrate this, knowing this is just the beginning of our efforts to build the best founder experience in venture. We are incredibly motivated to continue to build better ways for folks in the Susa family to connect, share and learn from each other.

To get into the weeds and see the data behind our efforts, check out our Coda template here!

Natalie is the Head of Operations and has been with Susa for three years.

Rachel is an Executive Assistant and Operations team member and has been with Susa for two years.