Investors: if you could reclaim 10 hours a week, where would you reinvest them?
Recently Harry Stebbings challenged me: “How do agentic workflows change the product journey for an investor—excite me.”
He let me screenshare and I walked him through Scout, Harmonic's agent that builds and diligences your pipeline.
The verdict ➜ Now VCs can spend their energy winning the right deals instead of finding and diligencing them.
📹 (watch the clip below for a walk through)
Where does sourcing or research still steal time from your week? Drop details about your time-suck below; I’ll share how we’re tackling it.
#VentureCapital#AI#DealFlow
As the agentic workflow, how does that change how you are today and how Avantra Investor would work? Because I totally understand. They're like, as I said again, it really blew my mind 4 out of nine deals, like that's a lot of deals. How does the genetic workflows change the product journey for a venture invested stay by excite me the way that we're thinking about it. And by the way, this isn't to get rid of analysts. It's not to get rid of associates the same way cursors not to get rid of engineers. It's to to let them have higher leverage on their time, right. But you, Harry, when you say A16Z just put out this market map, can you go analyze all those companies or I need a market map on like AI agents in the insurance space. You you ask your analyst to go do it, they bring it back to you. You probably regularly ask them the same types of things and then you ask them to bring you shortlist. You guys review them together in harmonic. The idea is all of those. Tasks are things you can just dispatch workers to do so you come into harmonic. You say get me a short list of every AI agent and insurance company, right? Build a market map around it. Show me the talent flow for all of them. Where has talent been coming in from? Has anybody left and started a new startup? Like are they are they a great alumni producing company? For example? Is this conversational because my my trouble with things like. Players. I'm not very smart, Max. And it takes so much intelligence to configure clay. I just can't You Am I allowed to share my screen? I think so. Alright, the the answer is yes, it's conversational. So if I say like AI agents or. Insurance, right? So this is the the agent that you're dispatching to go produce a short list for you. Right. You get all these back and then you want it to be conversational. So you're like, OK, these look interesting, but what about in Europe, Right, You've got Project Europe. You care a lot about Europe. Ohh, Max, you've done, you've done your contacts. Yeah, absolutely we do. So what about in Europe shows you AI insurance agent companies in Europe? And now you can dispatch research about them. Do you want to know if the founders been on any podcast work together in the past? Ask any question you want, generate a report about them. Right. So just just insane. It's pretty cool, right So like if you go to. Go to the team, I can see like have they hired notable people recently of interesting people left? Where do they hire most of their talent from? What schools have they mostly gone to? I suggest something as a content creator as well and ability to write viral tweets on the back of it. And So what do I mean by that? Basically when you look at great people that have joined the company, right of viral tweet about how Ramp have hired three of the best people, cite some of their experience and what it could mean for the company. I love that. That would be really interesting from a content creation perspective. That's that's like trivially easy for us to do, right, because the agent has all of the information. And this is where the like specialized models versus just using a bunch of general models that you stitch together. Conversation comes back in. Like those general models. You could easily go to ChatGPT, dump in all the information and say, build me a tweet. So for us, it's like, take the graph we have and just plug that step in. Indeed, I'm a podcaster. I'm looking at founders podcast. Experiences that appearances there. Ohh yeah well this is lying Chang's founders podcasts right? So this is something I've been doing this all the time. Whenever I look at a company I go to the this scout thing and I say have they been any podcasts and then I can go pull them up and listen to them and then we generate these. These briefs, ohh, you can get an overview, it gets sent to your phone, open it up on your phone. So imagine like every founder you're talking to next week, you just have you tell your associate, prep me for this. Don't tell your associate though. Tell this freaking cool, prep me for all these meetings and then open up your e-mail as you're heading to go meet the founder, prime yourself. Be like, what do they do again? Who's on the team? Where, where have they been hiring from? Who else plays in this space? How do those people stack up against each other? I mean like really understand the landscape. Wow, to be fair, when you think about large multi stage firms with like associates and principles, the, the thing that takes the time and that's actually really important, respectfully, is great founder engagement. It's me and Max meeting and me being like, hey, I saw in year 3 of Google for you, you did this project and I thought that was really interesting. Can you talk to me about that? I, I, there's no way I can do that if I'm meeting 10 back-to-back to back-to-back to back because that is like my sort, if you're able to take 50% of my talks, force away or like workload away. I can focus on making sure Max has a great day experience with me, not just getting through companies. That's exactly the point and the research you just said you wanna know Max worked for such and such time at Google. Somebody, somebody that I know is connected to him. They're connected because of this. He worked on this side project was really interesting. He's got a blog. This is what he writes about on the blog. He's been on these two podcasts and this is what he talked about for you to truly show up and and show the. Founder like you did your research, you care, you're interested. That's a lot of time to go click that either you or your associate is spending. The whole point of this thing in harmonic is get rid of all of that time, get the information you need, show up, sell the founder question. Have you thought about doing mammo creation? So I can feed you 10 memos of like how often firm structures them logos that are and then you get that structure and you can personalize it to insurance company a precisely So the idea that side panel that opened up the idea is every firm has their. Common questions or their common set of questions, they can save those. And then every time you you look at a company, you just fire off that set. Think of them like workers or like associates that are good at a specific thing. You have your library of them. So for every company, you know which ones you need to go send off to do work. Honestly ******* love it. Like it's it's it's you're so nice is actually the navigation element, as they said. For me, the really hard part is the cold start or it. Not being an easy UI to work around as is. No bashing, but other tools are just quite difficult to implement and to work around.
This is awesome! Finally a product that's taking adaptive artifacts in the right direction. So many people are obsessed with post-chat interfaces. But chat isn't the real issue - it's lack of fine grained artifact control (both in terms of enriching and interactivity). It's also really nice to see how the exploration workflow is born from Harmonic's deep vertical expertise. Love it.
This is the kind of shift that rewrites the rhythm of VC work—not just faster sourcing, but smarter decision-making. Loved seeing how Scout turns gruntwork into insight so investors can lean into strategy and relationships. Where else do you see agents reshaping the edge in early-stage investing?
Thanks for sharing, Max Ruderman! As an early user, we have been awed with Harmonic's progress in every new function/feature but this is really a game changer. I would love to know how this will effect on finding the nationalities of founders to scout diaspora startups.
Head of Procurement @ Vanta I Startup Advisor I VC Scout I Changing the Buyer + Seller partnership
2moLove the product demo Max Ruderman! Crazy how valuable this is