Day 8 A “Venturous” Day

Today is my eighth day at CoreNetwork Fund. Suddenly, it has been half way through my independent study here. I started today with reading the newsletter from Pitchbook, if you read my last blog, you know I have been obsessed with this website that posts a lot of current events related to VC and it never fail to get me started thinking innovatively on a morning.

The most interesting I read today was about a company called Rover, a Seattle-based dog-walking startup, founded by Greg Gottesman and Philip Kimmey in 2011. Rover is a pet-tech company provides a platform that connects pet parents with dog walkers, boarding services and day care providers. Last year, Rover merged with competitor DogVacay, which I called the most adorable merger ever. This all-stock deal combined the two largest VC-backed pet tech companies at the time. Earlier this month, the company announced the upcoming launch of its pet services in Europe, starting with the UK this July. The company currently serves 1 million pet owners in the US and Canada. Seeing Rover’s success, I found it a surprisingly interesting market that I have never thought of investigating into.

After reading Pitchbook’s newsletter, when I started going through more emails, I found that recently, I have gotten a lot of emails that are titled with something like “Updates to Uber’s Privacy Policy”. I was curious why are all companies suddenly updating their privacy policy?

So I went on to my Economist (one of my favorite subscribed news website) to see if there was any new regulation or a big privacy lawsuit. Not surprisingly, in April 2016, the EU announced it would soon be adopting the General Data Protection Regulation — a law that will more thoroughly govern the personal information and private data that companies and online social media platforms are able to access. Basically, the GDPR aims to ensure all your information is being used by companies responsibly. And though the law is based in the EU, the GDPR has a worldwide impact because any global online company that collects data from someone living in the EU will be held accountable. Now all my flooding emails of “updates about privacy” all made sense. I think I need to incorporate reading news into my morning routine more often.

Around 10 A.M., I started the tasks for CoreNetwork (also part of my final project): 1) Use Astronomer's VC Series A pipeline spreadsheet as model, reorganize the spreadsheet of prospects for EnosiX. Add columns of contacts’ Linkedin links, level in the company, and the number of deals their firms made before 2018 and just 2018. 2) Use crunchbase to find more prospects that invest 0.5-3M in one round, who are preferably from midwest. In addition, Erik wanted me to go over Astronomer’s investors and see if some of their the investment criteria can match EnosiX. 3) Highlight spreadsheet of most possible clients’ contacts.

Working with spreadsheet is a lot of manual work. I was a bit of upset that I didn’t get to finish all of them before leaving work today, but I will keep working on them tomorrow and read Chapter 11 Negotiation tactics in Venture Deals tonight. On my way out of the building, I was thinking what if there is a technology that can just allow user to select categories they want and the AI can help the user to generate spreadsheet of information. Interestingly, Erik told me this technology actually already exists, and pretty sure everyone has heard of the name: Bloomberg. Bloomberg terminal has a huge database and has the technology I wanted badly. However, it is a very expensive service ($24,000/year). Now my wish shifted from hoping such technology exists to such technology is less expensive. I guess a lot of business people would appreciate that, too.

Leaving work at 5 P.M.