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Download a pdf version of this case study

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Background

One of the world's most well-respected and largest venture capital firms, as measured by assets under management (AUM), engaged Everpeak to support a new initiative around asset management.

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The firm's limited partners (LPs) included high net worth individuals, universities and pension funds. Historically, the LPs had invested assets strictly within the VC funds, which were invested solely in portfolio companies. However, the VC firm had recently expanded its capabilities to include asset management outside of the portfolio - stocks, bonds, cash, and other investments.

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Goals

Everpeak was tasked with designing a comprehensive framework to assess, recommend, and implement the optimal technology solutions. This required that Everpeak conduct user interviews, understand the strategy, and then align the tech solutions with the overall business objective. The collective goals that we formulated were:

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• Relationships & Data - Making data a competitive advantage

• Privacy & Security - Non-negotiable; the need for internal and external controls around personally identifiable information

• ‍Efficiency - Moving quickly without sacrificing operational excellence

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The three software platforms we utilized for this project - all which exceeded expectations - are below. Let's find out why.

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Relationships & Data

Given the interconnected nature of the venture capital ecosystem, our client needed a clear understanding of the relationships between investors, employees, and portfolio companies. These key stakeholders form a tight-knit networks in early- stage technology and venture capital. Effectively tracking and uncovering these relationships was essential for maximizing value and identifying new opportunities.

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Salesforce Financial Services Cloud

To address this need, Salesforce Financial Services Cloud (FSC) proved to be an ideal solution because it is purpose-built to manage financial relationships and uncover insights and connections between different records.

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FSC natively addresses unique challenges and regulatory requirements with pre- built components and workflows that cater to banking, insurance, and wealth management. FSC also had the features needed to help the team collaborate, manage compliance and accomplish other goals (i.e. security, see next page).

Since FSC is built with financial relationships in mind, it also includes many of features that would need to be custom-built in other platforms. This not only includes the relational database so important in uncovering opportunities for our client, but also the basic "blocking and tackling" of a best-in-class client relationship management platform. This meant that our client would be able to track meetings, touch points, manage contact information, and create customer reports and dashboards.

Last but not least, the ecosystem of Salesforce software partners offered opportunities for today's tech stack (see page 7) and tomorrow's future functionality.

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Privacy & Security

For any financial services entity, privacy & security are paramount. However, in this scenario, the investors are ultra high net worth individuals, some of whom are covered by the media. In this case, Privacy & security meant more than just avoiding data breaches and securing personally identifiable information. It had ramifications for collateral damage that could impact the entire multi-billion dollar venture organization We sought solutions that could anonymize investor data from internal employees as well as 3rd parties - Everpeak included. With Salesforce FSC as the hub of the technology stack, we relied on additional Salesforce products Data Mask and a partial Sandbox.

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The Salesforce Sandbox gave Everpeak an environment to build and code in without any concern around impacting day-to-day operations. Salesforce Data Mask replaces data with random characters and numbers. This made all investor data invisible to Everpeak as we developed in the Sandbox.

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Copado

Finally, Copado is a DevOps platform tailored for Salesforce that enables businesses to streamline their development, testing, and deployment processes. It enhances collaboration, accelerates delivery cycles, and ensures high-quality releases within the Salesforce ecosystem.

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Copado made every element of the development process more manageable and allowed Everpeak to shorten its projected build cycle. We ultimately pushed changes into production from computers sent by the client that utilized a Yubikey. The privacy & security safeguards that we put in place could have significantly slowed down this project. However, with the support of Copado, we moved very efficiently.

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Speed & Efficiency

The mantra of Silicon Valley, as popularized by Facebook, is "move fast & break things." This mantra specifically does NOT work within the financial services sector. However, the intent is well understood and worthwhile - move quickly in a "test & learn environment" to scale, knowing that some tests will not work.

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Clari

The Salesforce ecosystem of integrated software is a huge value to clients, and one such software is Groove. Now part of Clari, Groove is a sales enablement tool that automatically captures sales activities like emails, meetings, calls, and more across different platforms. This ensures accurate and up-to-date data in Salesforce. It gets even better. Groove enabled our client to create personalized multi-step workflows such as bringing information from emails into Salesforce. It also allowed for automated tasks and reminders to help a fairly small team - none of whom are "sales people" - leverage their data and not rely on manual follow-up and data entry. Both Salesforce and Clari have made massive investments in Artificial Intelligence (AI). In the future, Clari's Al-driven forecasting insights can seamlessly integrate with Groove's engagement data to give our client a competitive advantage. Likewise, Salesforce Einstein and Data Cloud have the potential to help our client's investors understand their own complete financial picture.

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While not incorporated in the "version 1" tech stack, partnering with companies who are investing in Al positions our client for future, game-changing opportunities.

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Outcomes

There is no perfect project. There is no perfect technology stack. Everything is a balance of competing priorities, costs, benefits, and risks. There are only optimal processes subject to constraints, and the optimal process leads to the best outcome possible.

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This was an optimal outcome.

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The technology stack met all the goals of our client while providing future upside as their organization matures and scales. Our technology partners also allowed Everpeak to deliver on budget and faster than anticipated.