Finding Opportunities is Not Easy
As a technology investor, you are constantly searching for businesses with certain properties to achieve scale through synergies with an existing portfolio company, growing market share, expanding to new markets, or pivoting to tackle new segments and business models.
Excellent opportunities are rare. To be successful, you have to outwork your competition. You have to push more cases through your pipeline and find things that others can't at a sprinting pace so that you can build a suitable investment thesis and secure the target for upcoming meetings because skipping steps and throwing money at targets is not an option in 2023. Learnings from cases like FTX are loud and clear - make sure your bases are covered before investing in ventures, especially in changed macro-economical environments
Technology Due Diligence Should Not Be About Red Flags
Defining a sound investment thesis has traditionally been about commercial and financial opportunities. As the saying goes among our colleagues, "no one has ever not bought a company because they don't do unit tests." While this stands primarily true, tech DD should not only be about risks and red flags after everything makes sense on the business side. The contemporary world already offers a large set of data points and metrics, such as tech stack and infrastructure, security concerns, team composition, hiring trends, and process numbers like release frequency. It's only wise to use these data points when building an investment thesis i.e. explore business and tech synergies and opportunities.
Technology to the Rescue
How hard is it to map tens of thousands of data points, their connections, and relations into business benchmarks? Could we build the target's tech profile in seconds without them knowing? Could we translate the raw and deeply technical data into business markers such as the ability to scale business or leadership competency? Can we do all that? Sure we can! It is building on top of what we do day in and day out - using our software and practical experience to compile fragmented information into practical and coherent knowledge.
Definitely exciting days ahead of us. The customers we currently engage with to build the product are already super happy and see value in the opportunity to screen targets in earlier phases, helping them to save time and streamline processes.
Should technology be more involved in the investment thesis definition phase? We at Intium wholeheartedly believe so, but let us know your thoughts in the comments section.
Want to know more about our upcoming product and its features? Happy to jump on a quick call and discuss benefits and possible cooperation. Please send a note to mart@intiumtech.com