Benchmarking Over 5,000 Companies Across The Public And Private Sectors.
Objective
Creating an easy-to-use data product for investors.
Obstacle
Data modelling over 400 different metrics from multiple sources.
Outcome
Benchmarking over 5,000 companies across the public and private sectors.
Background
Founders Circle Capital (FCC) is a venture capital firm that supports high-growth companies through strategic investments and insights. Over the past 12 years, FCC has gathered an extensive quarterly financial dataset from both public and private companies, further enriched by detailed company metadata compiled by investment analysts.
FCC plans to combine these datasets to deliver even greater value by generating powerful insights that benchmark potential investments across industry, sector, and growth stage. This enhanced approach will also support FCC’s network of 500+ CFOs, empowering them to assess performance more effectively and refine their financial strategies for sustainable growth.
Challenges
Data Silos: Quarterly financial data is stored in Google Sheets, company metadata resides across Salesforce and Airtable, and public datasets are sourced from the Public Comms API. This fragmented data storage hinders the ability to generate valuable, self-serve insights and restricts deeper data exploration.
Data Quality: Company metadata is manually input by investment analysts without consistent data definitions, leading to frequent mislabeling and inconsistencies, particularly in categorical fields.
Fragmented Solution: Although some data sources are centralised, the process is not automated to capture the latest updates. Additionally, the codebase for merging this data is error-prone, lacks structure, and does not follow best practices, making maintenance and scaling challenging.
Solution
Cost-Effective Data Stack: We proposed and implemented a composable data pipeline that leverages the most scalable and cost-effective tools for each data function. This pipeline, which refreshes data daily and supports self-service across teams and the CFO network, operates at under $100 per month.
Automated Google Sheets: Using Google Apps Script, the latest financial data is automatically pushed to the central data warehouse (BigQuery), while company metadata and insights from curated data models in BigQuery are pulled back into Google Sheets with a single click.
The Proof Is In The Numbers
5,000
440
12
Implementation
One Source Of Truth: Managing data across multiple platforms can be time-consuming and prone to inconsistencies. To streamline this process, data from Airtable, Salesforce, and public communications sources is automatically extracted and integrated into a centralised data warehouse daily. This automation ensures data consistency, eliminates manual errors, and provides real-time insights that stakeholders can rely on.
Financial Metrics Modelling: Accurate financial insights are crucial for strategic planning and growth. To achieve this, over 400 unique financial and growth metrics were carefully coded, tested, and integrated into an automated daily refresh system. These metrics cover critical areas such as revenue trends, profitability, cost efficiency, and operational scalability.
Benchmarking & Regression Models: Understanding how a company performs relative to its peers is key to identifying strengths and areas for improvement. To facilitate this, quartile and decile benchmarks are calculated for each company, allowing for direct comparisons within the same industry, sector, and revenue class. This structured benchmarking process helps organisations measure their competitive standing and adopt best practices from high-performing peers.
