In Business 2.0, Rafe Needleman writes about a “dashboard” product to help VCs monitor the status of their investments:
Dotcom flameout notwithstanding, the need for this product is greater than ever. Venture firms still have billions of dollars invested in technology startups, and there are a lot of people worrying about that money. The startup CEOs are struggling to survive with their part of it, the VCs are trying to help them and also are trying to figure out how to spend the remaining funds, and those who committed money to VC’s want to know if they’re ever going to see a return.
Naturally such a dashboard would be useful to the management of the specific companies in question as well.
This idea, a sort of convergence of the enterprise portal with business intelligence and a portfolio model, has been out there in various forms for some time. I know, for example, that VentureVortex had a product like this in the works a year ago. I’ve lost track of them since then.
It occurred to me the other day that there may have been a slow adoption of BI solutions during the crest of the boom. Aren’t we seeing now that some CEOs preferred plausible deniability over the transparency of the “instant close”?