My guest is Rob Kniaz - partner at Hoxton Ventures and H Tree Capital. Rob has a Computer scientist degree and he has been part of Google Adsense team as a product manager. At Hoxton Ventures he is part of an investment team and also hacking together data tools for better decision making.
In our conversation we talk about changing investment landscape, how that is affected by availability of data, what is “Rob Score” and we geek out on some technical aspects about LLM's, data scraping and data analysis.
- About Hoxton and H Tree Capital
- Background at Google
- From California to London
- Early steps in data driven approach
- Being single person “data team”
- Designing and capturing signals
- Building ETL system
- Data challenges
- Data decay problem
- On ML stack
- ChatGPT impact on the process
- Team involvement with the tool
- The “Rob score”
- Usage across VC value chain
- Value of time series and following company progress over time
- Data stack
- Scraping tips to crawl anything
- How data approach changes VC industry
- Arms race of data
- Future of VC industry and founders raising money
- Importance of surfacing data
- VC as a sales job
- The perfect CRM tool
- How LLM’s change VC game
- Personal CRM as extension of mind
- Challenge with follow-ups
- Advice for VC firm which starts data approach
- Lack of tools in Europe
- Where to find Rob
Starwatcher podcast 7 - Rob Kniaz from H Tree Capital and Hoxton Ventures