How Can Floww Optimise Your Portfolio Management?

How Will Floww Optimise Your Portfolio Management? Data Is The Difference.

If there is anything to be learnt from the past year, it’s that data is king. The management, or mismanagement of data, is binary: it’s a success or failure, even life or death, matter.

Excel is the weapon of choice for private fund managers. Up to 68% of General Partners use spreadsheets as their primary tool for key data functions such as valuation, portfolio analytics and investor relations. The data exchanged here is crucial for capital and portfolio allocation decisions.

This is bad for business. An inability to store historical data, no visualisations and ‘spreadsheet creep’ all conspire to make Excel an unsuitable tool for financial data management. And yet we still use it.

But just because the world runs on Excel, it doesn’t mean you have to.

We’ve created a platform that lives on data – and it’s going to replace your messy tech stack full of myriad portfolio and investment solutions. Here’s how.

The Power Of Visual Data

At Floww, we believe data needs to be seen – living and breathing, warts and all. That’s why our portfolio analytics and management tool is rooted in the idea of circular language.

All companies you have invested in are represented by colourful circles of varying sizes, depending on the function that you want to apply: whether that’s core KPIs such as valuation, P&L and cash flow, or important people metrics, such as team size and diversity. Your data can be spliced and diced to your desired view through all mainstream metrics once it’s structured in this circular way.

We want you to have a sense of scale when looking at your portfolio. And our circular approach to data visualisation enables you to see the size of your success.

Visual relationships are created, allowing you to correlate between elements you wouldn’t see in an ordinary portfolio management tool.

Investments can then be grouped into particular funds, allowing you to apportion your portfolio by investment strategy, goal or region. The performance of these funds can be tracked across time and compared to one another, illuminating the success of particular strategies.

Visualising data in this way is of strategic importance – it’s about using a scale to bring clarity to which investments and people work, helping your fund make smarter, data-driven decisions.

Data In Diversity

The most successful founders come from all creeds, colours and walks of life. It is this diversity that breeds innovation and perspectives that lead to success.

Yet it has become harder for fund managers to identify diverse talent where it springs. Competing portfolio management solutions just don’t have the functionality. It’s an area of opacity in the VC world where there should be clarity. And we want to break these barriers down.

That’s why we have created ethnic and gender diversity indexes in our portfolio analytics suite.

All startups on our platform are encouraged to submit information about the diversity of their team. We then use this to create our own metric, measuring the diversity of a particular venture. Fund managers can then apply this function to their portfolio, allowing them to track the performance of investments by a founder gender or ethnicity index.

We want fund managers to identify this talent at the source. By putting diversity at the heart of portfolio analysis, Floww enables GPs to pursue diverse investment strategies, increasing the chance of founder and fund success.

Source Data Leads To Success

Data, not lunch dates, should drive funding. This is the foundational idea of our platform.

There are a plethora of deal-sourcing platforms in the market. But none of these solutions is able to present clean, accurate financial data from source. Web scraping leads to legacy data, incorrect valuations and uncertainty about deals. Floww reduces inaccuracy.

In-House Data Ingestion

We ask startups to submit a cap table and financial model to our in-house, qualified accounting team, who validate the accuracy of data submitted to us. Our team then ingests this data into a standardised format, minimising the time wasted for VCs.

We know founders want to retain agency over what data is shared with prospective investors. This is why we have created a permission system. Startups can choose what level of submitted data is shown to investors on the network, adjusting the transparency of KPIs to desired preferences.

Contextualised Data: Industry Benchmarking

By using source data, we have a unique opportunity to create accurate benchmarking statistics for different sectors. Context is key. VC firms receive Excel models every day, but without any contextualising information. And without it, GPs are unable to assess a startups’ real value.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is a great example of this dilemma. It is one of the most useful metrics in the startup world, used to foretell a ventures imminent success or failure. Yet a GP requires extensive experience in a particular industry if they are to assess what is and isn’t a promising CAC.

Through aggregating the source data we receive, Floww is able to create accurate industry-specific benchmarks which provide that missing contextual information.

Investors are able to look at a startup and compare a metric, CAC for example, to a sector-wide average. Data can be compared with peer averages to highlight under or over-performance. They can create bespoke benchmarks, prioritising the metrics that matter to them the most.

Hold Your LPs Close

Floww is not just about data (though we do have quite a penchant for it).

It is about a network of real merit and data you can trust. By joining Floww, you become part of the Floww Discovery Network. From here VCs have filtered access to an unlimited range of deals, with over 1000 of the brightest startups looking for funding on our platform. Floww is a singular ecosystem from which to search for all startups, pre-classified by sector, stage and location.

Having access to the cleanest, most accurate data means nothing if chaotic backend processes scupper investment decisions and deals. That’s why we provide a suite of productivity tools for streamlining workflows, helping teams make smarter investment decisions.

Our Kanban tool allows fund managers and GPs to track deal flow across all stages of due diligence, negotiation and final investment. Collaboration is key, and managers are able to track GP deal sentiment across time with DD questionnaires as well as voting functionality.

Our platform is designed to house all information surrounding deals, data and investor relations; a singular ecosystem platform from which a whole venture capital fund can be managed.

Sure. A spreadsheet done well is satisfying. But our dynamic data warehouse is better. Book a demo here.