Venture capital and private equity firms struggle to monitor their investments. 

It’s not the financials that they can’t keep up with. That information is typically disclosed via reports or dashboards on a regular basis. 

It’s what those “portcos” – as they are known – are telling the rest of the world in blogs, media interviews, posts on social media or podcasts. 

There is just so much information coming from so many platforms in so many formats. The VCs want to know what they are saying to both consume it and share it with their investors.

My friend Matt Ober, a Partner at Social Leverage, explained the problem this way:

“Each Sunday we send out an email about what our portfolio companies are doing. To get that information we have to monitor the web sites not only of the companies but all the founders and co-founders who are tweeting, writing blogs, posting on LinkedIn and going on podcasts.” 

Last week, he noticed Jake Schuster from Gemini Sports had posted about a new product and included a YouTube video explaining the feature. Matt happened to stumble across that scrolling on LinkedIn. 

Collecting information like this is an age-old problem that’s gotten much worse in the digital age, especially as CEOs and founders become the “story tellers” for their companies on a growing number of platforms. 

Pricing Culture, the company I co-founded with Bhargav Shivarthy, is working on solution.

We identify the people and platforms to monitor and leverage AI to generate short, standardized summaries of blogs, podcasts and social media posts. 

The content is delivered in a feed to clients, making it easier for people like Matt to monitor the posts from his founders and portcos in one place. 

We recently built a feed that follows 150 companies in the funds managed by Social Leverage. It summarizes each article into something that functions akin to the old-fashioned RSS feeds. It’s not fancy or flashy, just useful. 

Next, we added a nifty feature that automatically converts those summaries into three possible versions of a post for LinkedIn. The formats range from casual (including emojis) to professional to formal. These could be posted on social media or used as the basis for a post. 

In Matt’s case, he wants to leverage the nuggets for his weekly newsletter that includes tidbits about what the companies in the portfolio are doing. 

We’ve built similar feeds for several other VCs, customizing dropdown filters for topics like Crypto, AI or Robotics to focus on areas of interest. 

DM Bhargav or me if you are at a VC or PE firm interested in checking it out.