PS#041: BONUS – Tips for Network Building
Before we dive into market map building, I just want to provide a few quick tips that will help you stand out in your internship or first role as an investor.
It can be hard to add value as someone just starting out in the venture industry. It’s hard to know what is truly valuable, what you should or should not do, and where to spend your time (especially in those 10 week internships).
Well, today, I’m going to give you 3 easy ways to make sure you’re providing real, lasting value for your firm/fund.
(1) Build and maintain a network database.
Shockingly, a lot of firms don’t have their relevant network of investors and ecosystem players organized in an easy-to-access, efficient manner.
This is an opportunity for you as an intern or new investor.
Build out an Excel spreadsheet, Google sheet, CRM system, etc. to help the firm organize all of its relationships. This will provide instant value to the fund, making sourcing and diligence processes much easier.
In some cases, you might find that they have their investor network linked to the deal CRM. While this is useful, they often won’t have all of the types of investors (i.e., from the earliest stages through to the acquisition stage) cataloged.
When it comes to the ecosystem, this information is rarely organized in one place. It’s often locked in someone’s email, phone, or just their own head.
The better you can categorize all of these relationships by owner, relevant industry, investment parameters, knowledge set, etc. The more easy it will be for the fund team to leverage.
Before you go and pull this together, I recommend speaking with your team to find out what categorization would be most helpful.
(2) Document these interactions & synthesize them.
Being willing to take notes can be an easy way to get yourself into the most important conversations for an investment.
In a lot of my work, I talk about not getting “stuck” as a business development rep at a venture firm. You don’t want to be tied to only sourcing and building the top funnel. You want to make sure that you’re learning the entire venture skill set.
While those opportunities to really dig into diligence might not come immediately, one way to start getting involved is by documenting diligence calls.
In the tip of above, I talked about building out a database. This is just an extension of that effort. Offer to take notes, document the interaction, and synthesize the information for the deal and your broader investment thesis.
By combining the information from these different relationships into view (or thesis), you’ll be helping build the perspective for the fund/firm on a given space.
(3) Add to the database, maintain relationships.
For the first two tips, I’m offering easy ways to support value that has already been created by the firm. Well, let’s take this to the next level.
Start adding important investor and ecosystem relationships to the newly established database.
This works really well in two ways:
It’s a tangible metric that demonstrates real value
If you hold the relationship, you’ll find yourself involved in deals further down the pipeline (i.e., diligence, transacting, closing, etc.)
For that first point, this is a metric that a lot of firms track. It’s something that you’re graded against as an investor. The more relationships that you add for the firm, the more it can improve sourcing and diligence efforts. Plus, it’s always great to say, “I’ve added X investors and X diligence relationships for the fund during my internship” to help secure the full-time role.
On the second point (and as I mentioned previously), you want to get yourself involved with as much of the investment process as possible. If you own the relationship, senior investment professionals will need to make sure you’re included in those conversations. This will give you more and more opportunities to show off your venture skill set.
Those are just a few tips for adding value early on as an investor.
It might seem simple, but you’re laying the foundation for long-term value.
Now, as promised, next week I’ll be kicking off my series on how to 10x your market map building process.
