In our first design meeting, "Moneyball for Investing" became the catchphrase for our application. Everyone latched onto it. There was one problem: where were we going to get the data?
For anyone uninitiated with the term, Moneyball is the book -- and later the movie -- about the 2002 Oakland A's and their GM, Billy Beane. The A's got crushed by the Yankees in the 2001 American League Division Series, then lost three star players to free agency. Beane needed replacements and didn't have the budget, so he got inventive.
Using data, Beane built a system for finding undervalued players who could still win games. Through trial and error, a team of misfit toys figured out how to win -- they even went on a historic streak that season -- before losing in the ALDS again. But Beane changed the game of baseball forever. Two years later the Red Sox used the same strategy to break an 86-year World Series drought.
Moneyball works. But it depends on one crucial variable: having data. Baseball had been collecting player data since the 19th century, and that data had been accessible to the average fan since 1951. Why it took so long for the sport to use its own statistics to make hiring decisions is a separate article -- but it's a lesson investors haven't learned either. Investment statistics have existed far longer than baseball statistics. So why are people still investing on intuition?
To be fair, a few venture firms -- SignalFire among them -- are using data to make investment decisions. But they're the rarity, not the norm.
Conversations with potential customers have been telling. "Can't you just make the decision with just the name of the company?" one of our salespeople was asked last week. Our own design sessions kept drifting toward the same idea -- that we should make the decision for the customer. I keep asking: where would that data come from?
It isn't just inaccessible. It isn't standard, either. These aren't public companies. The data lives in spreadsheets seen only by a company's executives and its current investors -- and what even counts as relevant data changes by business type. A real estate deal doesn't care about monthly churn; a SaaS deal doesn't care about local zoning sentiment. Each is decisive for the other.
Asking a system to make an investment decision from nothing but a company name is like asking your accountant to file your taxes without handing over any of your financial documents.
So we built a survey tool that lets you collect data from your own potential investments, reusable so the data stays consistent, plus a scoring tool to help quantify the decision. But the decision itself -- invest or don't -- is still yours to make.
We aren't Moneyball for investing. We're the diary you keep to track what you were thinking when you made the call. Our goal is to illuminate your investment decisions so you can learn from them and make better ones next time. We're building tools that help you decide with more information, not tools that decide for you. You still have to do the work of gathering the data only you have access to, and weighing the considerations that matter to you. We can do the math. You have to give us the values.