Consumer VC: Venture Capital I B2C Startups I Commerce | Early-Stage Investing I Brands Aditi Dash and Joe Hovde (CircleUp) - Balancing data with founder-market fit when investing in consumer brands
Mar 29, 2021
33:29
My guests today are Aditi Dash and Joe Hovde from CircleUp. CircleUp Growth Partners is an early-stage consumer fund that takes a data-driven approach investing in compelling companies. Aditi is one of the investment partners and Joe is one of the data analysts. This is a fascinating conversation about building a data base for the private markets and using that data base as a tool to help make investment decisions and discover trends in CPG.
Some of the questions I ask Aditi and Joe:
- Let's start at the beginning. What was each of your attraction to working with consumer brands and the private markets?
- For those that aren't familiar walk us through a little bit of the history of Circle Up.
- One of the difficulties in the private markets is that company information is private. I understand that you are building a platform to help make investment decisions based on data, but what's that process of convincing a company to share its metrics and data with you?
- How has the platform helped make investment decisions?
- What are some of the ways that you've been able to leverage data?
- What is the relationship between data and how you make decisions when it comes to investing?
- How do you make sure you don't overindex on the data when analyzing a company to invest in?
- What are the most important metrics
- Has the platform led to help you discover new trends?
- What are some of the trends that you are most excited about?
- Walk us through your due diligence process.
- What makes a strong founding team?
- What's one thing that you would change about venture capital?
- What's the best piece of advice that each of you've received?
- What's one piece of advice that you have for founders?