A little over two years ago, we started our journey to fix the broken data sharing process between investors and founders. During that time, we’ve helped dozens of venture firms and over a thousand portfolio companies seamlessly share monthly and quarterly metrics.

We’ve always leaned into product more than marketing, but as we scale our business, we’re starting to share what we’re building with the world. To accurately represent the problems we solve today, we have revamped our website, and we’re excited to share a couple of highlights with you today.

A detailed breakdown of the solutions we offer to investors and startups

We started in 2020 with metrics collection and nothing else. Since then, we have come a long way in solving critical problems for both investors and startups. Today, our dual-sided portfolio management and collaboration platform supports leading investors such as NFX and Foundation Capital, as well as some of the fastest growing startups in the world like Affinity and Stytch, to centralize, analyze, and share data with their key stakeholders. Our new website highlights many of the key features we’ve built for both sides of the ecosystem.

Customer stories

See how investors such as 8VC and Pantera Capital are using Standard Metrics to optimize their data collection and portfolio collaboration processes. Soon, we will share stories from our startup customers as well on how they are leveraging the platform to streamline investor relations and maximize stakeholder collaboration.

Blog

We’re in the process of moving our Substack blog to our website, centralizing it alongside everything else, so you can access our content more easily. Check out our latest post “RIP Portfolio Monitoring.”

Board decks

Our board deck resources are not new, but we want to highlight them here nonetheless. Our goal is to solve information asymmetry for both investors and founders, and board meetings are an obvious mismatch of knowledge and experience. Here are some best practices from world-class investors such as David Sacks and Joe Lonsdale for founders to effectively run board meetings.

We’d love to hear your feedback. If you’re an investor looking to improve your portfolio management and collaboration processes, or a founder looking to streamline investor relations, contact us today to learn more about how you can benefit from using Standard Metrics.

Data security has been a core value to us from day one, especially in our industry where venture capital firms and portfolio companies collect and share extremely sensitive and confidential data on a daily basis. That’s why we are extremely happy to announce that Standard Metrics is now SOC 2 Type II compliant!

What is SOC 2 Type II?

Governed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), “System and Organization Controls” (SOC) is a framework to ensure a business is exercising best practices for maintaining data security. To obtain SOC 2 certification, a business must be audited by a third party (Coalfire Controls in our case) and prove that it has robust controls and processes that comply with SOC 2’s five “trust service principles”: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy.

While Type I reports focus on a point in time, SOC 2 Type II reports evaluate a period of time to ensure that the systems are actually operationally effective and not just theoretically sound. We recently got our first Type II report to cover the audit period from Jan 16th to Apr 15th, 2022. Moving forward, we aim to renew our Type II report every year.

What does this mean for our clients?

We have always put confidentiality and security at the center of everything we do. From your perspective, nothing will change on the platform. Only now, you can comfortably know that our security is aligned with industry standards and best practices, as verified by an independent firm. As your firm expands, Standard Metrics will continue to be a trusted enterprise partner to support your portfolio monitoring operations.

TL;DR – We have raised a $23.7M Series A at Standard Metrics to scale our collaboration platform for financial data and operating metrics for the private markets. Our vision is to provide a lingua franca for every stakeholder in the innovation economy.

In 1901, the United States Congress founded an agency called the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) with a mandate to spur innovation and industrial competitiveness by instituting common scientific and technological standards. Imagine the chaos that would ensue if different manufacturers disagreed on the definition of a meter or a kilogram, for example!

Today, much of the innovation and economic growth in our society is driven by the private capital markets, which now constitute over $5T in assets globally between venture capital and private equity (having at least tripled in size over the last decade). Ironically, the private markets operate with few standards and even less software. The lack of standards for what metrics matter and how information should be shared and discussed creates meaningful friction points at every layer of the innovation economy, from companies, to their investors, to their investors’ investors, and beyond.

Most venture capital and private equity firms operate out of Microsoft Office. There is no accepted standard for collecting and comparing portfolio company data like you would see from public company filings, and the manual workflows typically employed are painful, time-consuming, and inconsistent. The portfolio companies don’t have it any better — investor relations is becoming an emerging need as cap tables grow larger at earlier stages and companies are stuck managing their metrics and investors out of offline spreadsheets and email, a challenge we outlined in a previous post titled Broken Investor Relations. Finally, the limited partners of these funds are stuck pouring through various legacy data rooms full of PDF files to understand what’s happening with their fund-level investments. The SEC has even recently proposed rule changes to require standardized regular reporting on fund performance from private equity GPs to LPs for the first time.

As a group of former investors and operators, our team has experienced these problems first hand, and we have dedicated ourselves to solving them for the past two years. Today, we’re thrilled to share that our company — formerly known as Quaestor, now called Standard Metrics – has raised a $23.7M Series A from an amazing consortium of investors led by 8VC. Packy McCormick from Not Boring did a terrific write-up on our company’s strategy and round of financing, which you can find published here.

Our vision from day one at Standard Metrics has been to build a collaboration platform for financial data and business metrics, providing a lingua franca (common language) for every stakeholder in the innovation economy. We started by tackling some of the most frustrating manual workflows that exist around investor relations. We have assembled an ambitious team and built a network of dozens of venture capital firms, many of whom have now invested in our company, and over a thousand companies globally who are using our software to track the metrics and relationships that are most important to them. Standard Metrics’ automated portfolio monitoring product for venture capital firms and core investor relations tools for companies are the first steps in a long journey to build better infrastructure across this industry.

Standards matter. With the support of firms like 8VC, Spark Capital, Alpha Edison, January Capital, First Trust Capital Partners, Slack Fund, Fin VC, Socii Capital, Not Boring Capital, Gaingels, and many other fantastic funds and angels, we are building a critical mass of investors and customers who care deeply about how the private markets function and are coming together to build those standards for the first time.

If you’re interested in seeing how our software can help your firm or company, please visit our website standardmetrics.io.

And if you’re as passionate about this topic as we are, we’d love to hear from you. We’re hiring on all fronts (engineering, sales, customer success, product, etc.) and you can find all of our open job descriptions and ways of getting in touch here.

To our customers, investors, and supporters — thank you for your help so far on this journey. We have a lot to prove, and we look forward to serving you in the years to come.

Something is Better than Nothing

In the public markets, investor communication is driven by guidelines that are in place for regulatory reasons. Companies fall in line and adopt the cadence of quarterly earnings and annual meetings. They give their investors the information they’re entitled to, in a compliant manner, at the right time. While this leaves lots to be desired, there is at least a standard to adopt so chaos doesn’t ensue.

Despite having a much closer relationship with their investors, startups are left to their own devices when it comes to Investor Relations. While this might seem like white space, it quickly devolves into a vacuum that leaves both founders and investors disjointed. What begins as a promise of collaboration, too often fails to materialize.

Startups see Investor Relations as some combination of a time-sink, a low priority item, and a chore. These are understandable reactions to a flawed manual system of communication. The current paradigm fails all stakeholders yet persists because common sense says something is better than nothing.

And we end up here.

There’s a better way, and after spending years on both sides of the table, we deeply understand each side’s pain points and expectations. We’re working hands-on with early supporters at Quaestor to solve core workflow and communication challenges. We believe that integrations with key data sources will provide for a richer and more automated collaboration experience and a deeper, improved relationship between startups and investors.

What is Investor Relations for Startups?

The industry doesn’t have a standard for what bad, good, or great investor communication looks like. Investors don’t have a modern solution to understand the health and status of their portfolio companies at a granular or holistic level. Companies don’t have the proper tools and resources to effectively communicate with their investors.

The only real consensus around how startups should communicate with their investors is that there is no consensus.

“Entrepreneurs often spend an enormous amount of time raising and optimizing who is involved in a financing round. However too few founders tap into their investor and advisor pool sufficiently after all that hard work.”

While most would agree that investor communications are important, how to go about actually doing the communicating continues to be a perplexing question.

“Most investors eventually ask founders to send monthly email updates. These updates can seem like a tedious task, akin to your parents asking you to call them every week when you go to off to college. Since founders are busy and writing takes time, it’s tempting to skip updates and hope no one makes a fuss. Besides, monthly check-ins only benefit investors, right? Wrong. Almost every founder that I’ve talked to finds the act of writing updates valuable, often to their surprise.”

Far too much advice in the startup world is prescribed as if it’s the only solution to the problem. Rather than telling startups how they should communicate with their investors, we want to empower both companies and investors with software that makes the entire process easier. Before we can start asking questions of data, it needs to be organized and displayed accurately in a trusted and centralized location. What begins as dashboard quickly morphs into the control panel that powers the investor communication channel.

Ending “Let me know how I can be helpful?”

Despite investing in cutting-edge technologies and products across industries, most VCs continue to use dated software or cumbersome solutions built for private equity hoping that it can be adapted to fit their needs. We’ve experienced these inefficiencies first hand and believe there’s room to build a product with VCs in mind.

While simply having a centralized and consistent store of your entire portfolio’s data is a much-needed first step, we’re even more excited about what unique insights can be unlocked as a byproduct of being able to ask and answer new questions armed with this data. We’re still in the early innings, but we’ve started to see initial signs of adoption of this thinking in the ecosystem.

Investors spend hours trying to collect, organize, and synthesize disparate data points forcing them to mostly operate in a reactive mode. We view success as empowering investors to be proactive. We’ll enable this switch by giving them real-time visibility into the health of both their overall portfolio and individual companies. This way, they can deploy resources when needed rather than wondering where they can be helpful.

Founders should want to arm their investors with information that makes their relationship stronger and more effective, yet historically this has been yet another manual and time-consuming process to worry about. How a company communicates with their investors is critically important. It shouldn’t be outsourced or deprioritized, it should be improved. With the click of a button, founders will be able to share data that they deem important to the relevant stakeholders.

Software can remove so much of the friction associated with both understanding the health of your company and communicating those data points with your existing investors. More importantly, increased transparency allows for better communication allowing you to leverage your investors. After all, isn’t that what they’re there for?

The Future

We’re initially focused on startup founders and investors, yet we know that the ecosystem is broader than that. We’ll eventually connect the other nodes that make up the innovation economy’s vast network. Over the past decade, we’ve seen how easy it is for employees to be left in the dark for too long. Translating feedback from investors to share with employees shouldn’t be seen as a chore. While some information is sensitive, founders should be able to click a button and immediately update all relevant internal and external stakeholders. Giving founders software that empowers them to plan effectively and collaborate seamlessly with their investors is the first step of many when it comes to fixing Investor Relations for startups.

If this vision piques your interest, I’d love to connect and continue the conversation. You can find me here.