Portfolio Operations
The work after the wire: hiring, pricing, pilot design, rights-holder introductions and getting a company genuinely ready for the round after ours.
Every firm claims to add value after the investment. The honest version of that claim is narrow: there are four or five things a specialist investor can genuinely do better than a founder can arrange themselves, and a long list of things where the founder is better off with a specialist supplier or with nobody at all.
These are the ones we take on. Everything here is offered rather than imposed. Founders choose what they want, and the only commitment we make unilaterally is to answer within a working day.
Hiring the first commercial roles
The hardest hires in this industry are the first head of partnerships and the first solutions engineer who can sit in a venue operations meeting without losing the room. The people who can do those jobs are already employed by a league, a venue operator or a ticketing incumbent, and they are not on job boards.
We help with the parts that are transferable: writing a scorecard that describes the job rather than the wish list, designing an interview loop that tests for the actual failure modes, benchmarking compensation for early sales roles where equity does most of the work, and sourcing from the operational side of the industry rather than from software companies alone. We do not place candidates and we take no fee.
Pricing and packaging
Sport buys on a calendar and pays on structures that do not resemble ordinary software procurement: per-seat, per-event, per-transaction, revenue share, or a platform fee with a variable component tied to attendance. Choosing wrongly early is expensive, because the first three contracts become the template every subsequent buyer benchmarks against.
We work through the model with founders: which unit actually scales with the value delivered, where the floor should sit so that a small club is still profitable to serve, how to structure a revenue share that a rights-holder’s finance director will approve, and how to price a multi-year deal in a market where attendance is not guaranteed.
Every pilot should have written exit criteria agreed before it starts and a date on which it converts or ends. Pilots without either become permanent free deployments that consume support capacity and block the account from being sold properly.
Tenders, procurement and the season
A large share of rights-holder spending goes through a formal tender, and the process rewards preparation rather than product. We review responses before they go out, focusing on the parts founders routinely underweight: security questionnaires, data processing terms, service level definitions, insurance, and evidence of financial standing for a company that is two years old. We also help sequence the pipeline against the competition calendar and the buyer’s budget cycle, because a proposal that lands in the wrong month waits a year.
Introductions, made sparingly
We hold direct relationships with commercial and ticketing leadership across leagues, clubs, federations and venue operators. We use them carefully. A first meeting with a federation that goes badly can cost a founder eighteen months, and it costs us the credibility that made the introduction possible.
So we pre-brief in both directions: the founder gets an honest account of what that buyer can actually sign, who else needs to be in the room, and what will kill the deal; the buyer gets a straight description of what the company does and does not yet do. If we do not think a company is ready, we say so and explain what would change our mind.
Next-round readiness
We start preparing for the following round from the day ours closes. That means agreeing the operating metrics a Series A or B lead in this sector will ask about, instrumenting them properly rather than reconstructing them in a spreadsheet nine months later, and running a mock diligence session before the process starts. It also means being honest when the metrics are not going to be there, and helping the founder plan for a smaller round, an extension or a different outcome while there is still time to choose.
What we do not do
We do not parachute in interim executives, we do not run sales on a company’s behalf, and we do not operate an in-house agency that portfolio companies are steered towards. Support that replaces a founder’s judgement is not support. Our job is to make the decision better informed, and then to stay out of the way.
Building in portfolio operations?
Tell us what you have shipped, who is paying for it and what you are raising. We read everything ourselves and answer with a written reason either way.