Standard Metrics

““It was very much a manual process that sometimes had incomplete metrics requiring even more follow-up. It was time consuming and tedious on both sides.””

““So then after going through all those materials, we still needed to do additional outreach to somebody at the portfolio company to try to get what we needed — which required significant manual effort from us and was likely annoying for them!””

““Every time we think about revamping a process, we think, ‘maybe Standard Metrics can do that,’” said Scarborough. “Standard Metrics is on our mind every time.””

““I didn’t want to wait another six months to renew,” said Scarborough. “Our general partners have asked for years to have one place to go where they can see — in one view, in one click — all of their investment data in one place. I want to show them that Standard Metrics is not just a finance team product, but an investment team product.””

““Standard Metrics also makes portfolio data collection “more efficient for portfolio companies,” added Scarborough. “They don’t have to fill in the information multiple times, because they already do it for their other VCs that are on the platform.””

““It used to take me so much time to find data in Google Sheets because I had to click the link of each company to find what I needed,” added Lux Capital CFO Segolene Scarborough. “Now with Standard Metrics, all I have to do is filter by the fund and all the companies and data points I need are in front of my eyes.””

““Standard Metrics is dynamic,” said Lux VP of Finance Samantha Cho. “It’s easy for us to wiggle. We can do anything: dice and slice data however we want it.””

““There are some bigger companies that would never respond to our emails and yet have been providing responses within Standard Metrics,” said Gritsch. “It’s not something that we expected. Now they provide information on a timely basis.””

““Standard Metrics has cut down at least 25% of the time I spend preparing tear sheets,””

“I don’t look at this as software; I look at it as an extension of my team.”

“It felt like Standard Metrics was a system built with that in mind. We didn’t want to micromanage; we wanted to be better investors and offer more proactive support to our portfolio companies.”

““I think fund two is going to outperform fund one,” said Rai. “And I think part of it is the orientation of the founders around business metrics, and making sure to understand that if they don’t track it, it’s not real.””

““A lot of our portfolio is led by first time founders,” said Rai. “They don’t have any background in reporting and Standard Metrics gives them discipline and forces them to think about their metrics. We are a very high performing fund and I think part of it is financial discipline, with founders measuring their business by data and not by hearsay.””

““Because LPs now actually look at the report, they will ask questions,” said Ross. “Before I would send it into a void and not hear anything back. But there’s been several times where LPs are now like, ‘Oh, wow, this is a really nice report.’””

““It takes me two days from the time that I actually have all the information to the time I’ve got the reports done, and that’s the whole process,” said Nahir. “So it’s much faster, much easier, much more reliable.””

““Once the information comes in, the consistency that we can now provide to our LPs is improved,” said Ross. “Now everything is just so smooth.””

““It’s been helpful for when we’re on our team calls talking about the portfolio just being able to log into Standard Metrics and see ‘XYZ company did $2.6M this quarter, their runway is this, and so-on,’” said Ross. “Standard Metrics has been a useful reporting tool, but internally it’s also a good portfolio management tool as well.””

““I think one of the reasons I was attracted to Standard Metrics was your service component — the fact that you actually had a resource that would partner with us and essentially become the person that we needed to help our team and be readily available,” added Rai. “If you didn’t have that it would have been more difficult for us because we are a small fund with a very small team and we really needed that resource to help us.””

““I really appreciate the work that Standard Metrics puts into reaching out to founders and CFOs of our portfolio companies, and improving response rates,” said Ross. “A lot of my job in the past was spending three weeks a month bothering people and being ignored. It’s just been night and day for us.””

““Claude and the Standard Metrics connector are just tearing down the barriers to entry to doing these kind of things,””

““It’s the same with Standard Metrics. The data is clean, correct, and I don’t think about it. It’s just feeding everything else.””

““That’s where Claude comes in. Claude will take that production piece and then let you do the analytics and thinking.””

““We use Claude at Munich Re Ventures, and I think as they’ve kept making progressive jumps in the model, it’s become easier and easier to just ask questions and pull the information out of Standard Metrics in Claude versus having either static dashboards or dashboards that have to be updated and maintained,””

““This quarter, we did a dual process,” said Rochkind. “We did our original quarterly reporting process — which had always been manual — and then we did a full AI process where we used tools to get the information from Standard Metrics, information from our Excel files that we’ve kept, information from our partner meetings and updates, and then built a full-blown quarterly report. It was a great exercise and I think we’re super happy with how the results came out.””

““Before six months ago, if someone wanted to ask, “hey, what were our top five revenue producers within our 200 portfolio companies?”, the question would come to my desk, we’d pull a report, and we may even have to ask Standard Metrics to help us out pulling some of the data,” said Rochkind. “Now, someone could just log into Claude, ask that question themselves, and that data gets spit out. We’re able to link to Standard Metrics using the connector to Claude.””