A fund runs two funnels and instruments neither.
Dealflow and LP capital are both pipelines with stages, owners and a cadence. Most funds run them out of inboxes, a shared drive and one analyst's spreadsheet. We build them as systems.
The firm's memory is whoever took the meeting.
A company gets seen twice by two partners who never learn of each other. A pass is never written down, so the fund cannot describe its own anti-portfolio, and the sourcing question — have we looked at this before — has no answer anyone can query.
Two funnels, one record of the firm.
Venture capital — sourcingWhat a fund should be able to read back.
The dealflow pipeline
Sourced, screened, partner meeting, diligence, IC, term sheet, closed or passed — with the pass reason recorded as a property, not lost in a thread.
Company as the record
The company object carries the round, stage, sector and check size. Founders are contacts associated to it, so the fund can read back everything it has seen in a sector — including what it passed on.
The warm intro graph
Associations between founders, angels, operators and co-investors, so before an outbound email anyone can see who in the network already has the relationship.
Diligence, run as a process
Reference calls, customer calls, data room requests and the memo, tracked as tasks against the deal with an owner and a date rather than a checklist in a doc.
LP capital as a pipeline
Soft circles through commitment, subscription docs and close — with accreditation status, entity, allocation and side letter held on the record, not in a folder.
LP reporting cadence
Capital calls, distribution notices and the quarterly letter sent from segmented LP lists, logged against each investor so the fund can prove what went out and when.
What the partners record becomes the system.
Diagnose
An audit of the CRM, the data room and the partner spreadsheets: what the partners actually record, what the LP side is missing, and which deals exist twice.
Model
The two funnels written down — deal stages with entry criteria a partner can apply consistently, and the LP lifecycle from first conversation to closed commitment.
Build
Objects, associations, properties and permissions built in HubSpot, with the sourcing inbox, the document signature flow and the data room wired into the same record.
Hand over
Documentation and training for the platform and finance side, then a quarter running the Monday pipeline meeting and the LP send alongside your team.
The work starts at the term sheet.
The dealflow system gets built and the work that starts at the term sheet does not. Quarterly KPI collection becomes one person chasing founders by email, and the go-to-market help a fund promised arrives as advice rather than a system. We build the same stack inside the portfolio company that we build inside the fund.
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