The First Round BOT

The dictionary defines a bot as “an autonomous computer program that performs time-consuming tasks, esp on the internet”.  Those of you who know First Round Capital have learned that we are fanatics about measurement and metrics.  We believe that it is easier to improve something when you have a metric, and can tell objectively when things get better.  Analytics are at the heart of web based businesses, and we’ve also made them at the heart of our FRC culture. This past week, we held our Annual meeting with our investors.  We have been collecting data almost since day one about every aspect of our business – deal flow, voting habits, performance of companies, performance of our portfolio, etc. 

To make sense of all this data we are fortunate to have built an outstanding BOT.  This one is not a computer, but our Back Office Team.   Led by Jeff Donnon, our CFO, this group of five people did yeoman’s work, both on and off the computer, to put together the charts, graphs and data analyses that help us provide strong transparency to our investors. When you look at almost 3,000 deals each year, and tens of funding events, there is a huge amount of data to make sense of.  Yet our BOT, which I doubt we could automate into a “bot”, has done this work quarter after quarter to make sense of our investment pace, decision timing, reserve planning and so many other factors. They are helping us to find the signals in all this noisy data.  While the business of judging entrepreneurs and ideas will always require some key human judgments, having our BOT adds analytics that let us focus our attention on the people part of the equation, while adding the quantitative view to our process.

So kudos to the team, and I’d encourage any of you who want to adhere to the high standards of transparency that we do, to build a BOT that can not only crunch numbers, but also help make sense out of them.

 

Comments

[Keyword Tool]

Good thing this BOT they've made makes life more convenient. There are a lot of BOTS out there that destroy a lot of internet tools.

[Facebook Development]

I sent out requests for the first round of feedback to participants in the Yes/No Bot experiment.In about a week I will send out another round of questions and it will be the time to draw some conclusions.

[Marisol]

The problem isn't about anrodid,it's about blackberry.Cuz simply Blackberry phones are a little over-protective.first your friend needs to enable his bluetooth connection and setup the connection channel to your device (it's done like all other phones) after that he has to go to media>press menu >choose receive using bluetooth .He has to do that for everything u send him.Really hope it helps.

[Monster Beats SOLO]

Post a comment posted by site:http://waytooearly.firstround.com

[Monster Beats By dr. dre]

To make sense of all this data we are fortunate to have built an outstanding BOT. This one is not a computer, but our Back Office Team. Led by Jeff Donnon, our CFO, this group of five people did yeoman’s work, both on and off the computer, to put together the charts, graphs and data analyses that help us provide strong transparency to our investors. When you look at almost 3,000 deals each year, and tens of funding events, there is a huge amount of data to make sense of. Yet our BOT, which I doubt we could automate into a “bot”, has done this work quarter after quarter to make sense of our investment pace, decision timing, reserve planning and so many other factors. They are helping us to find the signals in all this noisy data. While the business of judging entrepreneurs and ideas will always require some key human judgments, having our BOT adds analytics that let us focus our attention on the people part of the equation, while adding the quantitative view to our process.