The Full Ratchet (TFR): Venture Capital and Startup Investing Demystified

Chris Farmer of Signal Fire Ventures joins Nick to discuss his firm and their platform, Beacon, a robust data engine that reveals the best sector, market and startup investment areas. We address questions including:

  • Can you start off with the firm's thesis and your main focus at SignalFire?
  • You talk about the four big founder pain points that you've observed... what are they?.
  • Number one pain point is Hiring top engineers...  Tell us about his Data platform, Beacon, and how it addresses this pain point?
  • Sourcing and analysis tool that helps show you where to focus?
  • Can you give me an example of what you see when you look at a sector, sub-sector or even at the company level?
  • Does this data really exist with very early-stage startups or nascent sectors, before they've really emerged and have traction?
  • Sources?
  • I've worked for companies that had a difficult time getting one database to talk to another.  Can you really source unstructured data, from limitless sources and structure it in a way where it's streamlined, uniform, single record and can be used to drive insights?
  • Do you think about data that is empirical and fixed vs. data points that can be influenced... and if you find an strong startup profile that is missing a couple of key elements that can be influenced, will you engage and attempt to address those factors w/ the founder?
  • I've looked over the consumer and enterprise sector lists where you invest... and it's a pretty broad list.  Can you really have a data engine that works well for such a varied and broad landscape?
  • Essentially a sector by sector sensitivity and regression analyses?

 

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Direct download: FR142_Farmer_p1.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:36am EDT

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