142. Beacon: An Engineering Systems Approach to Investing, Part 1 (Chris Farmer)

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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