142. Beacon: An Engineering Systems Approach to Investing, Part 1 (Chris Farmer)

Chris Farmer of Signal Fire Ventures joins Nick to discuss his firm and their platform, Beacon, a robust data engine that reveals the best sector, market and startup investment areas. We address questions including: Can you start off with the firm's thesis and your main focus at SignalFire? You talk about the four big founder pain points that you've observed... what are they?. Number one pain point is Hiring top engineers...  Tell us about his Data platform, Beacon, and how it addresses this pain point? Sourcing and analysis tool that helps show you where to focus? Can you give me an example of what you see when you look at a sector, sub-sector or even at the company level? Does this data really exist with very early-stage startups or nascent sectors, before they've really emerged and have traction? Sources? I've worked for companies that had a difficult time getting one database to talk to another.  Can you really source unstructured data, from limitless sources and structure it in a way where it's streamlined, uniform, single record and can be used to drive insights? Do you think about data that is empirical and fixed vs. data points that can be influenced... and if you find an strong startup profile that is missing a couple of key elements that can be influenced, will you engage and attempt to address those factors w/ the founder? I've looked over the consumer and enterprise sector lists where you invest... and it's a pretty broad list.  Can you really have a data engine that works well for such a varied and broad landscape? Essentially a sector by sector sensitivity and regression analyses?   To listen more, please visit http://fullratchet.net/podcast-episodes/ for all of our other episodes. Also, follow us on twitter @TheFullRatchet for updates and more information.