Day 7 Developing CRM (Customer Relation Management)

Today is my seventh day at CoreNetwork Fund. In the morning, I received two tasks for CoreNetwork today: 1) Investigate two products called AirFlow and ClickStream, then write a comparison. 2) Create a Hubspot CRM for CoreNetwork Fund (as part of the final project).

In order to compare the differences between the two products, I first tried to looked them up and see what they are. Unfortunately, even after spending almost an hour going back and forth to look up almost every computer science term on Wikipedia, I was still confused. Finally, I found the website of a company (that has these products) but again, the product descriptions were lengthy and written in terms. My task was to write a precise and concise comparison for Erik and Bob (so that it saves their time to research and know why it was such a big deal for one of their companies to launch Airflow), but if I cannot understand these products myself, how could I write the comparison? Then, I thought of contacting someone from the website and ask questions to clear my confusion. With the customer support help, I walked through the product descriptions again and finally understood both products. Then, instead of writing paragraphs, I made a comparison chart for both products so it is direct and saves time to read. When I finished this task, it was around 1 P.M. and I could now enjoy my lunch.

In the afternoon, I worked on my final project of VC Fundraising. Yesterday I had finished a spreadsheet that had all contact information and company information using excel. Today, Erik introduced a software called Hubspot to me, and my task was to create an CRM (Customer Relation Management) for CoreNetwork Fund. For a long time, CoreNetwork Fund has been using spreadsheet since it’s a relatively small company and no one in the company has had time to investigate in a CRM system yet. However, it doesn’t mean they do not need it because the better a business can manage the relationships it has with its customers the more successful it will become. It is a strategy to learn more about customers' needs and behaviours in order to develop stronger relationships with them. I spent about two hours watching a lot of tutorials of how the website works and what functions it had. One of the awesome functions it had was to allow me import information from excel! But before I could enjoy that convenience, I needed to reorganize the data the way the software could adapt. Around 4 P.M., I finished importing 38 prospects’ contact and their company information.

Before leaving the office at 5 P.M., I read Chapter 10 in Venture Deals, which talked about How Venture Capital Funds Work. Rather than going into details, I will share what I found most interesting and something new I learned. There was this thought I had about VC that was totally wrong. I thought a VC fund is basically a super wealthy company that just invest the money they have. However, a typical structure of a VC Fund is in fact made up of 3 entities. A graph structure might explain the hierarchy better as well:

Around 5 P.M., when Betsy (a colleague) and I were leaving the office, I was waiting for her at the elevator. But she walking towards the stairs and she said, “Bye! I am taking the stairs (the office is on the 7th floor).” I smiled and said, “Haha a check for Daily exercise.” I realize that is actually a good idea and I think I would do that when I work at a office in the future, too, since the office setting really doesn’t allow me to move around a lot.

Today I have reached my overall goal of learning How Venture Capital Works through reading chapter 10 because it was actually about how VC works. By understanding the demand of the two different softwares I was researching, I satisfied my first goal of learning about how to determine whether an investment is good or not through looking at the criterias VC firms have for investing. As for my second goal of knowing the process of a VC deal, I think I hit that by working on my final project as well because CRM is a very important part of the process of making a VC deal. By finishing today’s reading, I also reached my third goal of reading the book.