Real-Time Information across the Lifecycle of the Purchase Order

Mark Volchek, Founding Partner, Las Olas Venture Capital

Mark Volchek, Founding Partner, Las Olas Venture Capital

There are countless phrases venture capitalists hear in a pitch that bring palpable excitement to an investment committee. However, one thing that consistently straightens our back in a pitch is when a founder says their company is replacing excel.

Las Olas VC (LOVC) is a venture capital fund that invests in seed-stage B2B software companies. We are typically lead investors with a check size between $1.5M to $2.5M into companies based in the Northeast, Southeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest. We believe that contemporary enterprises prioritize innovation. The implementation of technology to modernize outdated business processes has catalyzed a new era of productivity growth along with a shift towards everything being digital, anytime, anywhere. And the people building the next category-defining companies for enterprise exist everywhere, not just the traditional technology hubs. As a result, LOVC aims to be more than just a check. We lead rounds, take board seats, and take it upon ourselves to implement a deeply hands-on and supportive approach with our founders and CEOs.

As software investors, we are long time believers in companies that provide tools to operationalize and expand organizational access and usefulness of data. With investments across industries in business intelligence, data visualization, and financial tools, the firm has developed a deep understanding of the usefulness of creating easily accessible data in optimizing key business decisions. Thus, LOVC looks at a diverse array of businesses and founders.

Software that replaces excel consistently excites us because there is a clear demonstration of a problem that seamlessly maps to a software solution. Integration of this software is easier and user engagement is higher when a complex spreadsheet is being replaced. This is because excel killer replaces manual processes with automation. The drudgery of data management is often the worst part of a job, so users are more willing to adopt new technology that eliminates this banality.

Additionally, we love businesses that replace excel because it simplifies sales. It’s easy to communicate the value of your software when it replaces a manual process. An easy to understand value proposition makes a company’s vision rosier and clearer; consequently, a repeatable sales motion becomes feasible when a founder clearly communicates how their business replaces costly existing processes with efficient improvements.

When investing in the seed stage, it’s hard to fully understand how sticky a product is. Often, products are freshly implemented and founders have little retention data. This lack of quality data is one of the largest risks in underwriting early-stage technology companies. Software that replaces manual processes like excel helps assuage these concerns because these solutions become critical company[1]wide to clients. We love hearing customers lament how cumbersome their processes were prior to the business because it signals to us that churn will be low. What would the client do without it?

“ With investments across industries in business intelligence, data visualization, and financial tools, the firm has developed a deep understanding of the usefulness of creating easily accessible data in optimizing key business decisions “

For instance, many of our portfolio companies are excel killers. Leverage is an AI-driven vendor relationship management platform that streamlines communication, collaboration, reporting, insights, and more into a singular cloud platform and fully integrates with existing ERP systems. Traditionally, businesses have relied on manual and time-consuming workflows (emails, phone calls, spreadsheets, etc.) to manage end-to-end supply chain visibility, while Leverage provides real-time information across the lifecycle of the purchase order.

Another LOVC portfolio that fits this theme is Mosaic. Mosaic is an AI and ML driven vertical resource planning application for managing work, tracking budgets, and assessing individual and company performance. Humans are generally poor at estimating time needed to complete tasks. Project planning software has been historically limited to certain departments responsible for resource allocation, and cross[1]department planning and individual time management is generally done by manual methods such as excel spreadsheets and time cards. By using software to accurately capture time and assign tasks, Mosaic’s platform can improve total billable hours by 3 percent or more without changing behaviors - resulting in profit improvement up to 50 percent. This huge customer ROI makes Mosaic a near-mandatory purchase for firms as they look to modernize their operations and improve employee efficiency without needing to increase overhead workload.

User Interviews, an LOVC portfolio that recently raised a $27.5M Series B, also supplants excel in a seamless and productive way. User Interviews has developed a large and growing panel of users, who they recruit, cultivate, maintain and pay as “surveyed users,” for major brands, product and tech companies. Similar in function to a carefully selected focus group, this user base creates a simple and fast way for product managers and user experience teams to gather user experience and feedback on a new product, design, interface, etc. from a group of users that have been individually selected for this specific project. Previously, user experience teams had the cumbersome job of finding survey users and would stitch together apps and spreadsheets to understand this feedback. Now, through user interviews, companies can gain insightful user feedback in a timely and efficient manner, while maintaining a consistent panel across the variety of user testing tools they may utilize.

Spreadsheet is the primordial tool of personal computing and still is ubiquitous in many industries. There are countless opportunities to replace and improve these systems for data management. If you are an entrepreneur working on such a solution, we would love to hear how you are doing so and support however possible.