Investor Productivity Tool Stack

DDVC #48: Where venture capital and data intersect. Every week.

👋 Hi, I’m Andre and welcome to my weekly newsletter, Data-driven VC. Every Thursday I cover hands-on insights into data-driven innovation in venture capital and connect the dots between the latest research, reviews of novel tools and datasets, deep dives into various VC tech stacks, interviews with experts, and the implications for all stakeholders. Follow along to understand how data-driven approaches change the game, why it matters, and what it means for you.

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Following last week’s “Second Brain” post on my knowledge management system, I received tons of creative replies with new ideas and tools I will definitely try out. Thank you so much for your input! Additionally, 87% of you asked me to share further insights on my personal tool stack via the poll.

I heard you - so here we go :) Today, I share a visual summary of my personal tool stack as a VC investor. Note that although there’s a strong overlap with our VC firm tool stack, there’s still a difference due to non-investment-related departments such as finance, investor relations, marketing & comms, HR, engineering, etc. Moreover, every team member has her own stack, none looks the same.

If you’re interested in VC/PE fund-level tech stacks more broadly, you might want to check out the “Data-driven VC Landscape 2023” as it covers 400+ tools used by 150+ investment firms.

Overview of my tool stack

For the sake of this article, I sat down, went through all my apps, tools, and tabs, and created a comprehensive list. After finishing this exercise, I was actually surprised by the high number of tools and the level of fragmentation🤯

In ended up with around 80-100 individual tools, depending on what we classify as a “tool”. I use approximately half of them (see visual above) on a daily basis and while this sounds still a lot, my biggest insight is that the greatest efficiency gains come from combining different “best-of-breed” solutions via APIs and automation tools.

Hereby, the majority of these solutions become rather a passive component of my stack as they get automatically triggered via APIs and other automation tools without me noticing it in the day-to-day. In the remainder of this article, I dissect some frequently occurring workflows into their individual stages and depict the tools that I use to execute them. All of these flows are connected via automation tools that I highlight at the end of the article.

Exemplary workflows and preferred tools to execute them

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These are some exemplary tasks in my daily job and I use the highlighted tools to achieve high-quality output with maximum efficiency. In addition to the depicted tools, I use a range of Plugins (check out “Top 13 Chrome Plugins Every VC Should Use”) and - of course - our internally developed data-driven software platform EagleEye.

Automation is the core of my tool stack

As mentioned in the introduction, the core of my tool stack is the glue that connects it all together, i.e. the automation stack. Without going into too much detail, I can clearly say that Zapier is among the most critical tools in my stack. It connects different software applications via thousands of readily available integrations, serves a great spectrum of logical conditions, and provides high reliability and uptime.

If you’d like to learn more about how I use Zapier in my daily work, you might want to check out this “10x Your Productivity With ChatGPT” post and download the free step-by-step PDF guide at the bottom. It shows how I use the OpenAI API and Zapier to create my own Slack bots and execute a number of tasks.

I personally advance my tool stack on a continuous basis, so it’ll likely be outdated soon. Of course, every stack is highly individual, just like your personal time allocation and goals.

I’d love to hear about your favorite tools in the comments below or via DM.

Stay driven,
Andre

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