Lerer Hippeau is an early-stage VC fund based in New York City investing in entrepreneurs with great ideas across industries. Notable investments include Guideline, MIRROR, Blockdaemon, K Health, Allbirds, ZenBusiness, and Thrive. Lerer has been a Standard Metrics customer since 2023, tracking the financial details, investment data, and KPIs of over 150 portfolio companies on platform since onboarding.

The Problem

When Lerer first came to Standard Metrics, the firm needed a source of truth for their portfolio and an easier way to collect, parse, and clean portfolio financial data and KPIs.

“In the old days when I was an intern in 2019, we just had thousands of Excel files sitting around, and my job as an intern was to collate all of that into one place and build the database of all of our financials,” said Max Wechter, now Senior Director, AI at Lerer Hippeau. “This was before Standard Metrics existed. I wish as an intern that Standard Metrics had existed.”

Wechter added that this took a significant amount of the team’s time: “When things are disconnected, it’s obviously challenging to make sense of all of the data that we have, challenging to make the most informed data-driven decisions and just inefficient.”

With Standard Metrics, Lerer was able to handoff collection, parsing, and cleaning to Standard Metrics, as well as make the quarterly reporting process easier for both the firm and their portfolio companies.

“We run a company onboarding process and what we see time and time again is that companies really want to use Standard Metrics because it’s so simple to use, easily integrating with QuickBooks or whatever accounting provider they use,” said Wechter. “We get incredible compliance across the portfolio because it’s just such a great tool.”

But the firm wanted to find a way to connect the portfolio data they had stored on Standard Metrics with company updates in Gmail, meeting notes in Granola, and CRM data in Affinity as well as ensure better visibility of portfolio performance across the entire firm.

The Solution

Accessing Standard Metrics data via Claude using our MCP proved to be that solution. CFO Dan Rochkind explained that he had already begun implementing AI across his entire workflows and Standard Metrics data naturally slotted in.

“We have pretty much implemented AI into everything that we do as a process in the CFO function, from reviewing financial statements that are prepared by our fund admin, to reviewing cash balances and even pulling data from our bank used in the cash reconciliations process,” said Rochkind. “One of the best things about doing anything with structured data, is that you can do a lot of really cool stuff using AI. Standard Metrics and the KPIs of our portfolio companies just fit right inside of that pipeline.”

The firm now uses Standard Metrics’ MCP to connect the data they have stored in the platform to Claude in a secure and permissioned way.

The Results

This has democratized access to insights on the firm’s portfolio to the entire firm versus just the back office, and has cut through data bottlenecks.

“Before six months ago, if someone wanted to ask, “hey, what were our top five revenue producers within our 200 portfolio companies?”, the question would come to my desk, we’d pull a report, and we may even have to ask Standard Metrics to help us out pulling some of the data,” said Rochkind. “Now, someone could just log into Claude, ask that question themselves, and that data gets spit out. We’re able to link to Standard Metrics using the connector to Claude.”

“Claude will pull all the latest information — including if there are any rounds that the company recently raised, what their burn is, et cetera. — from Standard Metrics, and just have it all in one easy answer,” added Wechter.

The quarterly reporting process with AI and Standard Metrics also dropped from fifteen days of work to two.

“This quarter, we did a dual process,” said Rochkind. “We did our original quarterly reporting process — which had always been manual — and then we did a full AI process where we used tools to get the information from Standard Metrics, information from our Excel files that we’ve kept, information from our partner meetings and updates, and then built a full-blown quarterly report. It was a great exercise and I think we’re super happy with how the results came out.”

On top of streamlining ad-hoc analysis and quarterly reporting, Standard Metrics has also improved Lerer’s ability to quickly generate tear sheets.

“Anytime we’re meeting or having a catch up with a portfolio company, we’ll produce a tear sheet,” said Rochkind. “You can now just go into Standard Metrics and get the investment detail of how much we put in, what our ownership is, and where the last quarter KPIs are tracking. That’s a quick tear sheet that takes 30 seconds to produce.”

Audits, too, are simplified with Standard Metrics.

“Years ago, the auditors would come up to our office once a year and have a half hour to an hour long meeting with all of our investment team to get an update on our portfolio companies. Then we realized, “oh by the way, we could just give you a login to Standard Metrics,” said Rochkind. “Giving them a login to Standard Metrics has made their process a whole lot better.”

So what’s next? As AI gets better, the things firms can do with Standard Metrics grow.

“As these new models get released, it only makes building products easier and easier, really building things to accelerate the team and augment the work that we do,” said Wechter. “I’m really excited about it.”