The 5 Metrics VCs Want to See

Matt Preuss
Marketing Manager
The Most Common Metrics Reading List
Unlock your investor relationships. Try Visible for free for 14 days.
Start your free trial

The world has been consumed by data and metrics — startups are no exception. Founders need to leverage their key data and KPIs to fuel growth, build products, create interest from potential investors, and more.

At Visible, we have a tool built for VC funds to collect data from their portfolio companies and enable GPs to report to their investors (LPs). In order to better help founders determine what metrics they should be tracking, we analyzed our data and found the most common metrics VCs are collecting from their portfolio companies. Check them out below:

The Most Common Metrics

  1. Revenue
  2. Cash
  3. Headcount
  4. Customers / Users
  5. Total Operating Expenses

The 5 metrics above are high level metrics that might sound obvious. However, great founders are able to recall them at anytime. Not knowing your key operating metrics is a ????. These can be used as the backbone for investor updates, board meetings, and determining more granular metrics to track.

P.S. 75% of investors are collecting anywhere between 1 and 10 metrics so chances are your own investor updates should land in the same range.

Reading List

Key Insights from High Alpha’s Finance Leaders

The team at High Alpha shares key takeaways from the finance leaders in their portfolio — they share why efficiency metrics are key in the current market, how data storytelling can be a differentiator, and more. Read more

Time to Refine Your Metrics: Defining Growth and Success at a PLG Company

Mikaela Gluck of OpenView Ventures highlights the key metrics that product-led companies should be tracking. Read more

6 Metrics Every Startup Founder Should Track

On the Visible Blog, we share 6 basic metrics that every founder be tracking and sharing with their stakeholders. Read more

You may also enjoy:
Product Updates
Product Update: Turn Emails Into Insights With Visible AI Inbox
Structured data. The holy grail of business intelligence. Structured data unlocks a realm of possibilities, from setting benchmarks to enhancing decision-making processes. Yet, in the venture capital landscape, accessing reliable, structured data remains a formidable challenge. This is precisely why we created the Visible AI Inbox. With unique features like automated metric detection and file parsing, the Visible AI Inbox stands out as a pioneering solution for portfolio monitoring. Discover how it can transform your data strategy by meeting with our team. Turning email into insights We believe that investors should spend time sourcing new deals and helping founders, not manually copying and pasting data from email 🙂. The AI Inbox helps aggregate insights that exist siloed in data, files, and updates across a venture firm. Updates from founders often stay stuck in one team member's inbox because it's too time-consuming to extract and enter the data and files into a more centralized repository. Visible AI Inbox makes this possible within seconds. Requests + AI Inbox = A Complete Picture The addition of the AI Inbox continues to advance our market-leading portfolio monitoring solution. The pairing of Requests + the AI Inbox will give investors a holistic view of portfolio company performance across a fund. Visible continues to be the most founder-friendly tool on the market. We’ll continue to build tools in existing workflows where both founders and investors live every day. How Does it Work? Visible AI Inbox works in three simple steps. Forward emails to a custom AI inbox email address Visible AI automatically maps data and files to portfolio companies Investors can review and approve content before it is saved From there, dashboards, tear sheets, and reports are all automatically updated on Visible. Learn more about how Visible AI Inbox can streamline workflows at your firm by meeting with our team. FAQ Will this be available on all plans? Visible AI Inbox is only available on certain plans. Get in touch with your dedicated Investor Success Manager if you want to explore adding this to your account. How is Visible addressing privacy and security with Visible AI Inbox? No data submitted through the OpenAI API is used to train OpenAI models or improve OpenAI’s service offering. Visible AI Inbox leverages OpenAI GPT 4 and proprietary prompts to extract data in a structured way and import it into Visible. If you’re uncomfortable with utilizing OpenAI to optimize your account, you can choose not to utilize this feature. Please feel free to reach out to our team with any further questions. These processes adhere to the guidelines outlined in Visible’s privacy policy and SOC 2 certification. Visible AI Inbox Best Practices We'll be sharing best practices for how investors are leveraging Visible AI Inbox in our bi-weekly newsletter, the Visible Edge. Stay in the loop with best practices and product updates by subscribing below:
Metrics and data
[Webinar] VC Portfolio Data Collection Best Practices
Customer Stories
Case Study: How Moxxie Ventures uses Visible to increase operational efficiency at their VC firm
Operations
How to Start and Operate a Successful SaaS Company