Bits of Cents

Disclosure: I’m a data nerd.  I love data.  I eat it up.  Given that today marks my 3rd year at Flybridge, I thought it would be fun to shine some light on the data I produce as a VC.  I have NO idea if these stats are typical, light, heavy, etc.  I have absolutely no point of reference here - this is just the raw data.  I also have no idea if this is at all relevant.  I just  find it an interesting lens in which to view my past 3 years (or 1095 days or 26,280 hours).  I also hope this is helpful to all the aspiring VCs out there who are wondering what a day in the life of a venture capitalist is.

Emails

Email is my primary mode of communication and therefore something I thought would be fun to look at.  Unfortunately I don’t keep all the emails I get on my computer.  Thankfully, I do keep each and every email I send and have since 10/30/09.  Let’s see what email traffic from my system looks like:

• Emails sent from 7/6/10 to 7/6/11: 10,874
• Average emails sent per day for the past year: 29.79

30 messages a day.  I’m not sure what my received to sent ratio is but it’s probably around 1 sent message for every 4 emails received.  Based on that, I get something around 120 emails a day.  That feels about right.  Too bad I don’t have the actual emails.

I was curious to see how my email habits changed since becoming a Principal here at Flybridge last summer.  Since I don’t have sent emails prior to 10/30/09, I decided to compare email activity between 1/1 and 7/6 for both 2010 and 2011.  The data:

• Emails sent from 1/1/10 to 7/6/10: 4,661
• Average emails sent per day from 1/1/10 to 7/6/10: 20.06
• Emails sent from 1/1/11 to 7/6/11: 6,006
• Average emails sent per day from 1/1/11 to 7/6/11: 32.29

Definitely more active on email over the past year, likely a result of chasing down my own deals and going back and forth with entrepreneurs.  Makes sense.

Meetings

Meetings are the lifeblood of VC - it’s the way you get to find out about new deals, diligence ones in the pipeline and help the ones we’ve invested in.  It’s much harder to count calendar entries than it is emails so I’ll take a 2 month section (5/18/11 to 7/18/11) as a sample set and extrapolate from there.

• Meetings from 5/18/11 to 7/18/11: 190
• Average meetings per work day: 4.41

Nearly 5 meetings per work day.  Crazy.  Most of my meetings are 1h in duration.  Extrapolating out that means I spend 1287 hours per year in meetings.  That’s 53.63 days.

I was also curious how many of these meetings fall into various categories.  Most of what I do can be sorted into internal meetings (i.e. our Monday partner’s meeting, etc), new company meetings (i.e. companies I’m meeting with regarding financing, sometimes more than once, etc), networking meetings (i.e. entrepreneurs who aren’t active on a new company, etc) and portfolio meetings (i.e. companies we’ve invested in).  Of the 190 meetings, what was the various split?

• Team meetings: 14 (nearly all on Mondays)
• New company meetings: 96
• Networking meetings: 60
• Portfolio meetings: 20

How about the per day split for those:

• Average team meetings per work day: 0.32
• Average new company meetings per work day: 2.23
• Average networking meetings per work day: 1.40
• Average portfolio meetings per work day: 0.47

So about two company meetings a day, about two networking meetings per day, portfolio discussions every other day and team meetings every 3 days.  For context, remember that I’m a full board member only on one company since Ready Financial merged with Account Now and I’m a board observer on three.

Now if only I was creative enough to create an infographic.  Maybe in another 3 years…