A venture capital CRM fails for a reason that has nothing to do with features: it was designed for a fund seeing forty companies a year and is being used by one seeing four hundred. Depth that is reasonable at low volume becomes unfillable at high volume, and what the fund ends up with is a partial dataset, which is worse than a shallow complete one because nobody can tell which parts are missing. This page is about designing for the volume you actually have.
One required field, and it is the source
At four hundred companies a year, every required field is multiplied by four hundred. Make the source mandatory because it is the only one whose absence cannot be reconstructed later, and let everything else be optional. A record that is complete on one field and patchy on eight is more useful than one that is patchy on all nine.
Screening has to be a keystroke
Most of what arrives is passed on within a day, and if recording that pass takes a minute it will not happen for the majority. A single-action pass with a reason from a short list keeps the denominator honest, and the denominator is what every conversion number depends on.
Keep passes forever, with the date and the reason
A company passed at seed is often live again at Series A eighteen months later, at a different price and with real evidence. In venture the reuse cycle is short enough that a discarded pass is a measurable loss, and going back with the previous reason in hand is a completely different conversation from going back cold.
Record who else was in the round
Co-investors are information about the company and about each other, and it compounds across a portfolio. Most general tools have nowhere to put it, which means the fund loses the second-order value: knowing which investors consistently back things that work is a durable edge and it costs one field to accumulate.
Questions people ask about venture capital crm
How many required fields can a venture record have?
One, realistically: the source. At four hundred companies a year every required field is multiplied by four hundred.
Should we record every pass?
Yes, and it has to take one action. The passes are the denominator for every conversion number you will ever quote.
Is a venture record different from a buyout one?
Same shape, different volume tolerance, plus the co-investor graph. That is why one product can serve both.