Jerry Ye's engineer ranking by schools, employers, churn, and capitalization shows Anthropic leading OpenAI three to four years ago.
Card-panel data from bank-brokerage interconnects covers 3-5% of US card spend and sells to hedge funds for seven to eight figures.
General Catalyst pioneers user acquisition financing, non-dilutive capital repaid from revenue share, with a $4-5bn fund.
Quantifying Venture Capital Through Talent Data and Card Panels
Venture capital is becoming a data business . Jerry Ye has spent his career trying to quantify the parts that partners usually judge by feel, from the talent a startup can attract to the card spend it generates . That work now extends to user acquisition financing, which lets post-product-market-fit companies fund growth without selling equity . The edge is largest where data is still untagged, and the hard part is getting a firm to act on it .
Takeaways
Talent flows can rank startups early. Jerry Ye built a resume-based formula covering schools, former employers, employee counts, churn and capitalization. An engineer-focused version showed Anthropic leading OpenAI three to four years before the episode, because Anthropic hired stronger pedigree signals and churned engineers less .
Card panels read product-market fit. The panels come from bank-to-brokerage interconnects, cover a 3 to 5 percent sample of US card spend and identify companies from credit card descriptors. Hedge funds decided a decade ago there was no more alpha, but most venture firms still do not use the data .
UA financing avoids equity dilution. It funds a large share of monthly user acquisition spend against a revenue share and is repaid from revenue, matching when cash comes in. Unlike venture debt, it is not recourse, which Jerry Ye calls more founder friendly .
UA financing has reached billion-dollar scale. Jerry Ye says another large venture fund raised $4 to $5bn just for this asset. BITKRAFT is a gaming and entertainment fund, a sector where fundraising has been depressed, and companies there have used UA spending to scale revenue three to ten times .
SignalFire used panels to find Grammarly. SignalFire invested early in Grammarly after card panel data showed the company inflecting with retention rates similar to a SaaS business. Grammarly later drew a billion dollar investment from General Catalyst .
Firm access and hit rates can be measured. Calendar meetings proxy decision-making before an investment committee or term sheet. Firms can tie data flags to investor meetings and emails, then compare a new principal's hit rate with junior associates and senior partners, but need top-down GP support .
Track record attribution remains hard. David Weisburd says even sophisticated LPs struggle to attribute success, and the saying that success has a thousand fathers while failure is an orphan affects VC hiring and LP investing, and it shapes which GPs startups choose. Access is a reverse-selling class .
How UA financing is underwritten
Companies in the program send their entire transaction ledger and daily ad spend for underwriting .
BITKRAFT benchmarks that data against other companies and builds predictive models on whether a cohort will pay back and within what timeframe .
Performance thresholds are set with each monthly investment, 40 percent ROI by the first month and 50 percent by the second, and funding pauses if a cohort underperforms .
After investment, the firm makes daily API pulls into the company's Stripe account and looks at its Meta and Google ad APIs .
