How the Susa Ops Team engaged 84% of the Susa portfolio in 2020

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How the Susa Ops Team engaged 84% of the Susa portfolio in 2020
How the Susa Ops Team engaged 84% of the Susa portfolio in 2020

A quick look at the dashboard and data behind Susa's portfolio support.

A quick look at the dashboard and data behind Susa's portfolio support.

Rachel Coffman

Natalie Arora

We’ve decided to open-source the actual data around our support, as well as the doc and dashboards we use to track our progress. For the sake of confidentiality, the names and details of each company have been changed, but the data is otherwise intact and ready to be customized for your own team's use!

If you’d like to read more about the Susa philosophy that led to the creation of this project, read our Medium post

here⁠

⁠

The purpose of this doc

At Susa Ventures, we believe that entrepreneurs are the lifeblood of progress, and we exist to help them realize their visions for a better world. This mission statement gives us a deep purpose; to strive to be the most accessible and supportive early-stage investor. To accomplish this, we leverage the Susa Family ー a deeply connected community of founders, investors, partners and advisors, and of course our team ー to support our portfolio founders and their teams.

The regular check-ins that our investing team has with founders are supplemented by the efforts of our small but mighty Ops Team (

Natalie⁠

Rachel⁠

), who are always building scalable (and sometimes very un-scaleable 🤪) systems and programs to support the Susa portfolio. The purpose of this doc is to track and measure the touch points our Ops Team has with our portfolio companies.

If you distill down our activities, there are two key types of value that we provide our portfolio companies:

⁠

Community Events⁠

(ex. Susa Bootcamps and Family Dinner event series)

⁠

Tactical Support⁠

(ex. service provider intro, knowledge/resource share)

At the beginning of 2020, we set out to measure the Susa Ops Team’s efforts for the first time. We settled on a goal of directly engaging (either via community events or tactical support) with 75%+ of Susa’s portfolio companies.

Tl;dr: We ended the year at an 84% comprehensive engagement level with our founders and operators!

Of course, we want the Ops Team to connect with 100% of the portfolio and understand that starting to track metrics and setting a baseline is just the beginning. As a team of two, with an active portfolio of 100 companies, we are happy to have a strong start on this journey of portfolio support.

⁠

How we track progress with this doc

We started the year tracking

Community Events⁠

and

Tactical Support⁠

via a spreadsheet but quickly ran into trouble. Two columns turned into two hundred, and even the smallest updates led to re-checking a tangle of formulas for hours on end.

Sound familiar?

Seeking a solution led us to Coda + the creation of this Coda doc. This data is broken down by the type of connection made with each portfolio company- first by quarter, then by year.

In this way, we are able to think critically about quarters that have less contact, assess why, and use the data to improve the founder experience in a proactive and thoughtful way.

Quarterly Summary

Quarterly Summary

Quarter

Total Events

Total Support

Event Coverage

Support Coverage

Comprehensive Coverage

Q1 2020

41%

44%

Q2 2020

59%

49%

75%

Q3 2020

31%

41%

57%

Q4 2020

41%

29%

53%

No results from filter

⁠

Annual Summary

After analyzing our quarterly data, we turn to our annual summary totals. The formulas allow us to analyze the data in a comprehensive manner, rooting out duplicate points of contact within any single quarter to give true year-end totals.

Year

Annual Events Total

Annual Support Total

Annual Event Coverage

Annual Support Coverage

Annual Comprehensive Total

2020

212

76%

62%

84%

There are no rows in this table

⁠

Lastly, we also keep a close eye on the

Companies⁠

page, especially those that still

Need a touch point⁠

. We’ll often identify the topic for our next community event by identifying common needs across companies we haven’t had a touchpoint with yet. We then coordinate with individual

People⁠

at our portfolio companies to provide timely and relevant support.

We’ve all made systems that met a goal simply by creating said system; the challenge is creating meaningful systems that are also sustainable. Coda has given us that balance. We build the formulas once and forget about them. We don’t have to rebuild or re-check the structure of the doc every time we add a community event or provide tactical support. Logging is as simple as clicking a button and adding attendees to the list.

⁠

Add a community event

⁠

Click the button👆 to add a community event.

Once entered, the new community event shows up in the

Community Events⁠

page, along with all the other events we’ve hosted. It’s just as easy to keep track of

Tactical Support⁠

given. No additional formulas needed!

⁠