The goal of the Sustain Fund Venture Relationship Management (VRM) platform

As we are developing our Venture Relationship Management (VRM) platform, the most important thing is important to keep in mind what the goal is ... the goal is minimize the wasted time, pointless frustration, unnecessary cost of a ill-conceived venture; the goal is not to eliminate failure -- the goal is to eliminate failure due to obvious, foreseeable pitfalls, traps, and tricky situations. The VRM platform is about developing a relationship management tool that helps the entrepreneur by bringing collaborative experience [of potential customers, investors, partners] to bear during the venture startup period AND allows potential customers, investors, partners to focus their efforts where it matters. On all sides, the matter of "qualification" and "authentication" matters enormously ... investors concern for privacy is justifiable -- even though they are willing to take risks and help people, they do not want to be "spammed" with requests from entrepreneurs who haven't done their homework or have silly, ridiculous business ideas ... entrepreneurs concern for secrecy is justifiable -- they do not want to "tip their hand" strategically or disclose their "secret sauce" of their technology.

The VRM must first of all be about authentication ... probably this is about some form of gated, gradual, step-wise accumulation of trust.

The VRM must be about moving projects forward according to a semi-predictable workflow where everyone involved understands what is expected of them at the next step AND what they should expect from others at the next step.

The VRM must be about communication ... all that the VRM's programatic venture workflow really does is delivers a "processsing job" to the computational power of an entrepreneur, an investor, a partner or a potential customer. Each workflow could vary, but a typical startup sequence may be something like this:

1. entrepreneur formulates specific request for resources to build a SET of different prototypes ... ideally set of different prototypes constitutes a designed experiment with choices of different factors chosen to maximize the potential for comparisons in design choices and to learn as much as possible a la Set-Based Concurrent Engineering [SBCE];
2. active investor/manager considers proposal and decides with entrepreneur whether to / how to involve partner/supplier;
3. entrepreneur, investor, partner/supplier agree on how resources will be procured and paid for -- who gets how much equity for supplying what;
4. entrepreneur builds SBCE set of alpha prototypes using resources;
5. entrepreneur and investor involve a set of potential customers in alpha prototype;
6. customers evaluate alpha, possibly passing it back-and-forth to the entrepreneur for fine-tuning and furnishes responses;
7. entrepreneur, investor and possibly partner evaluate results of customer trial and decide whether to go back to step 1 (rethink entire strategy, build another another set of prototypes) to move forward to step 8 or to scrap venture.
8. entrepreneur, investor and possibly partner evaluate results of customer trial and choose optimal configuration of factors for production-intent level of prototype ... again this involves procurement of resources, exchanges of equity for who funds the resources ...
9. entrepreneur builds production intent prototype
10. likely customers evaluate beta-level production intent prototype.
11. entrepreneur, investor and possibly partner evaluate results of customer trial and decide whether to go back to move forward to step 12 OR to "go back to the drawing board" all the way back to step 1 (rethink entire strategy, build another another set of prototypes) to recalibrate by going back to step 7 and re-examine flaws in production-level execution or to scrap venture.
12. entrepreneur, investor and possibly partner evaluate results of beta trial and devise strategy for optimal (i.e. in light of current data from beta trial) strategy for production launch and marketing ... again this involves procurement of resources, exchanges of equity for who funds the resources ...
13. entrepreneur builds production intent product for sale to customers
14. launch
15. refinement (SCRUM style) ... the first or second refinement usually involves an "unknown unknown" due to a set of interactions that are not realized until the product receives broader exposure ... at that point, a new or unforeseen opportunity presents itself
16. launch
17. refinement (SCRUM style) ... at some point it is necessary to take care of the unnecessary but "nice to have" refinements that were known about before, but "put in the parking lot"
18. launch
19. refinement (SCRUM style) ... at some point, it will be necessary to refactor and simplify or maybe to adjust the supply chain to bring in a better supplier ... three especially intense iterations are usually necessary to wring the bulk of the larger opportunities for improvement from a new launch ... three iterations is a good thing to aim for in terms of stability (i.e. transition / exit point) ... this does not mean that opportunities do not remain; it also does not mean that you launched too "dirty" ... three means that you got the launch about right
20. Transition -- exit of launch team to people who are better managers, better able to position the asset with others to perhaps to extend scale or scope of technology OR to allow for superior brand management and more intensive cost reduction

The bottom line with this 20 step sequence is that visualizing the process illustrates how much communciation matters ... we believe that a VRM tools could help because that there are so many many opportunities for including qualified participants, for improving communication ... it should be possible to do this better than with an ad hoc collection of CRM tools, contact managers, Excel spreadsheets and Project GANTT charts.