Yummy, dog food! Or: Running a VC fund in the Cloud

Point Nine not only loves animals, we also love dog food. After all, some months ago we invested in ePetWorld, which runs hundeland.de, a fast-growing online shop for dog food and supplies. Today I'm going to talk about a different type of dog food though.

If you know us a bit you'll know that we talk a lot about the Cloud. In our opinion, the move of software from the desktop or local servers to the Cloud, along with the consumerization of enterprise software and other developments that go hand in hand with it, truly is a revolution. Like in any revolution there will be casualties, in this case incumbents that aren't fast enough to adapt to the new realities, but fortunately it'a a peaceful revolution which only puts bad UIs, overpriced software maintenance contracts and "call us for a demo" websites under the guillotine. And like in any revolution there will be new rulers – startups that drive the Cloud revolution and attract tens of thousands of customers within few years. Our goal at Point Nine is to find some of these revolutionaries at an early stage and back them on their way from the bottom to the top.

Back to the dog food. We run Point Nine mostly using Cloud apps, and it tastes pretty darn good. I wrote about the idea of going "Office free" about seven years ago. Today we're using Google Drive (plus Basecamp) for 90% of our documents and spreadsheets, and ironically that's not because Google Documents and Google Spreadsheets are particularly good products. In fact I think they are pretty bad, and I'm amazed how slowly Google has been developing them if you consider that they were launched many years ago already. But the fact that Google makes it dead simple to collaborate on documents and spreadsheets, this one USP over desktop software, is such a compelling argument that we happily accept all of the products' shortcomings (makes me wonder, by the way, if there could be an interesting opportunity in building a better online version of Word and Excel).

While we're heavy users of Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets and Basecamp, by far the most important application for us is Zendesk ¹, which we use for deal-tracking ². It's our life blood, and I don't know how we'd survive without it. While Zendesk has of course been built for a different use case – customer service –, and Mikkel might kill me if he sees how we're using Zendesk, it turned out that because of its adaptability it works perfectly well for our needs. For us, every new potential investment becomes a "ticket", and we use Zendesk from our first encounter with a new company through the entire assessment of the deal up until we either decide to pass (about 99% of the time) or to invest (about 1% of the time, in which case Basecamp takes over, since we set up a Basecamp project for every investment to collect updates, notes, etc).

Here are some of the great things that Zendesk allows us to do:

• Every email that we receive at submit@pointninecap.com is automatically turned into a Zendesk ticket and gets assigned to Fabian, with the stage automatically being set to "evaluating". Fabian and Nicolas then do some initial research and add things like slides, spreadsheets (ouch, you got me) or call notes to the ticket. Once Fabian and Nicolas have made up their minds they assign the ticket to Pawel or me and set the stage to "Recommendation: Evaluate further" or "Recommendation: Pass". This makes the ticket appear in the respective view/filter for Pawel and me.
• It happens very often that we talk to a startup which looks interesting but isn't ready for an investment yet. Zendesk makes it easy to keep track of these opportunities. We simply set the stage to "Follow-up in 3 months" or "Follow-up in 6 months". After three or six months, Zendesk automatically sets the stage to "Take another look" and sends us an email notification.
• Zendesk makes it easy to stay up-to-date on everything since you'll get an email notification whenever a ticket is updated. You can reply directly to those emails to add comments to the ticket (as well as create new tickets by emailing them in), plus there are great apps for the iPad and the iPhone, so it's convenient to work on tickets on the go.
• Finally, you can use tags or custom fields to collect additional information about tickets. We are, for example, tracking deal sources and company locations, which is helpful for analyses that we're going to do in the future.

Bye now. I still have a bunch of open tickets in my queue. :)


¹ In case you don't know yet: Disclosure, I'm an investor in Zendesk.
² Dear founders, sorry to call your startup a "deal". That's VC speak and I hope it doesn't sound too disrespectful.