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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