What software is used by PE/VC firms?

A very senior person I worked w/ in the past is starting a new fund, roughly $80-100M VC. Target investments include early stage startups in tech and CPG (seed to Series C or so). He's super wealthy himself (putting $25M of his own money) and very well connected, especially to Hollywood celebrities, won't have any issues with the actual raise.

I did a lot of deal work for him back in the day, so I obviously understand that front. But he offered to hire me as a de-facto COO. I admitted I'm not the best for this job, but he offered to hire me anyways because I "know better than anyone how to figure shit out".

I'm set to join pending a few things by the Summer. I have some time, but want to pick ya'lls brain to get prepped for this. 

What are some best practice COO things in a PE/VC firm to do and what software is primarily used by PE/VC firms? I've only truly worked on the sell-side. I'll have an outsourced accounting team and outside counsel I can lean on for help. Any guidance on the ops side of things would be of tremendous help.

THANKS IN ADVANCE FOR THE THOUGHTS!!!

Comments (10)

  • Associate 3 in PE - LBOs
2mo 

You'll need a CRM to track all deal-related activity and interactions with people outside of the firm: DealCloud is very popular for that right now.  You'll probably want some kind of private company database, so would recommend getting demos from services like PitchBook, SourceScrub, Grata, etc. to see what fits best with what you're trying to do.  Can't think of much beyond that but we admittedly don't have the best tech stack.   

2mo 
Dave16, what's your opinion? Comment below:

iLEVEL comes to mind immediately, it's essentially portfolio monitoring for alternative assets. It helps with the data collection and presentation process. Although I think it's typically used for mid-size and larger firms it could be helpful for you as well

  • 1
1mo 
Icahnic, what's your opinion? Comment below:

Why brag so much. Cut out the first 2 paragraphs and you'll get way more responses

  • 1
1mo 
blueskysand52weekhighs, what's your opinion? Comment below:

PM I have a long excel of start ups (started to work on a personal project) I'll send it to you for free

1mo 
fnu_lnu, what's your opinion? Comment below:

Salesforce, Tableau; for larger funds that look at huge dataroom files/models, databricks, looker, snowflake, altryx, sagemaker can come in handy.  

1mo 
anonanalyst75, what's your opinion? Comment below:

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