Andre Retterath
Author of the Data Driven VC newsletter and GP at Earlybird Venture Capital.
- 💥Why You Need a New CFO, Small Funds Disappear, Optimal Portfolio Size, Future Path for AI Labs & More
- ✍️ How to Automate Deal Sourcing, Scoring, Memos, Intros, Reporting & More
- 💥When to Raise, Biggest Opportunity in Software, Building a VC AI Brain & More
- 🔥World's Hottest Startups in October 2026
- ✍️10 Takeaways from the DDVC Investor Stage at Bits & Pretzels 2026
- 💥Why LPs Pass, Where to Make Money in AI, New Fund Performance Data, VC Tool Budgets & More
- 🔥AI Labs Asked to Slow Down While NVIDIA Keeps Shopping - Here's the State of the Market in September 2026
- This Was Supposed to Be a Newsletter
- 🔥World's Hottest Startups in September 2026
- 🔥AI Creates More Startups - But Fewer Winners
- 💥VC Ranking Flaws, Borderless Founders, Tender Offers on the Rise, VC Network Atrophy & More
- 💥Top Employers to Create Outlier Founders, State of Pre-Seed, Cost of AI Talent, Tech Stack Ownership & More
“The report places most of the global VC market in the old-school stage, run on spreadsheets and gut feel, while fully autonomous quant VC remains rare, emerging, and contested.”
Source→“Hi, I'm Andre and welcome to my newsletter Data Driven VC which is all about becoming a better investor with data and AI.”
Source→“together with my friend Felix Haas and his team at Bits & Pretzels in Munich.”
Source→“Our 2026 DDVC Landscape Report covered how firms split budget between engineering staff and data, tools & tokens”
Source→“Hi, I'm Andre and welcome to my newsletter Data Driven VC which is all about becoming a better investor with data and AI.”
Source→“Year four was about consolidation. Instead of adding more, we brought everything we and our community built across the years into one place.”
Source→“Hi, I'm Andre and welcome to my newsletter Data Driven VC which is all about becoming a better investor with data and AI.”
Source→“The most advanced firms have dedicated technical C-Level owners, whereas the least advanced have non-technical Partners own the stack.”
Source→“Hi, I'm Andre and welcome to my newsletter Data Driven VC which is all about becoming a better investor with data and AI.”
Source→“Hi, I'm Andre and welcome to my newsletter Data Driven VC which is all about becoming a better investor with data and AI.”
Source→“Hi, I'm Andre and welcome to my newsletter Data Driven VC which is all about becoming a better investor with data and AI.”
Source→“AI-forward firms use Exa to source companies by thesis, enrich target businesses programmatically, and monitor signals across the market in real time”
Source→“Hi, I'm Andre and welcome to my newsletter Data Driven VC which is all about becoming a better investor with data and AI”
Source→“Hi, I'm Andre and welcome to my newsletter Data Driven VC which is all about becoming a better investor with data and AI.”
Source→“Andre Retterath - Author of Data Driven VC newsletter; VC investor and data/AI practitioner”
Source→“Hi, I'm Andre and welcome to my newsletter Data Driven VC which is all about becoming a better investor with data and AI.”
Source→“"Half of DDVC firms plan to make at least one engineering hire in the next 12 months. 0% plan to cut engineering headcount. On the investment side, the numbers flip. Only 2% of firms plan to hire a junior investor in the next 12 months. 45% plan to cut junior investor roles. This is the first year engineering headcount plans have outpaced investment headcount plans at DDVC firms."”
“Untapped Capital... cited as a leading example of the 'Workflow VC' model... Untapped is what we'd call a Workflow VC, a firm built around automated pipelines and custom workflows rather than a traditional junior bench.”
“Hi, I'm Andre and welcome to my newsletter Data Driven VC which is all about becoming a better investor with data and AI”
Source→“Investment firms used to ask whether to build internal tech stacks. Now they ask where to focus it to drive real alpha.”
Source→“"Stay driven, Andre" — newsletter sign-off; credited as the report's primary author”
Source→“The DDVC Landscape Report 2026 just launched! Check out how 345 VC firms are using AI and automation to become more efficient & win against their peers.”
Source→“49% Plan to Add Engineers: Half of DDVCs plan at least one engineering hire in the next 12 months, none plan cuts, and 51% expect flat eng headcount. 45% Plan to Cut Junior Investor Roles”
Source→“Andre Retterath - Author of Data Driven VC newsletter; VC practitioner and researcher - Author and driving force behind the 2026 DDVC Landscape report”
Source→“AI-forward firms use Exa to source companies by thesis, enrich target businesses programmatically, and monitor signals across the market in real time.”
Source→“Hi, I'm Andre and welcome to my newsletter Data Driven VC which is all about becoming a better investor with data and AI.”
“Hi, I'm Andre and welcome to my newsletter Data Driven VC which is all about becoming a better investor with data and AI.”
Source→“Hi, I'm Andre and welcome to my newsletter Data Driven VC which is all about becoming a better investor with data and AI.”
Source→“Hi, I'm Andre and welcome to my newsletter Data Driven VC which is all about becoming a better investor with data and AI.”
Source→“Lots of this data has become broadly available via providers such as Harmonic, Evertrace, and others. There's little value in rebuilding the scraping and pipelines. Focus should be on scoring to match your fund focus with highest probability of success opportunities.”
Source→“The traditional Act I harbor (a niche to reach $10-50M ARR before building adjacencies) now functions as a constraint. As software engineering costs drop, building Act I and Act II simultaneously is no longer unrealistic.”
Source→“This year your fund will buy roughly the same AI as the fund that beat you on your last term sheet. Same frontier model, same sourcing platforms, same enrichment layers, same chat box. The capability you are paying a premium for is quietly becoming the capability everyone has.”
Source→“At Earlybird, we have an internal wiki that contains majority of our process, assessment, deep dive, post-mortem, and other knowledge.”
Source→“In our DDVC Slack group, we started collecting and curating VC-related skills, and made it available with our partner OverDrive here: https://www.vcskills.com/”
Source→“This is exactly the split showing up in the data for our upcoming DDVC Landscape.”
Source→“Hi, I'm Andre and welcome to my newsletter Data Driven VC which is all about becoming a better investor with data and AI.”
Source→“The frontier is now repricing itself every six weeks, and any thesis built on a static capability assumption is already stale.”
Source→“Participants: Andre Retterath”
“Due to my own involvement in Aleph Alpha, I can't comment beyond the press announcements.”
Source→“Instead of ranking startups case by case via different growth signals, we unify all dimensions into a single metric: investor interest measured by the number of investors visiting the respective stealth/startup profiles on the Harmonic platform. This is a unique scoring you won't find anywhere else!”
Source→“The pattern: pick an industry where Workday, SAP, or Oracle still rule, then automate the human layer sitting on top.”
Source→“Eight of the fifteen companies attack regulated, legacy-software verticals (ERP, procurement, lending, insurance, SAP environments, home care), replacing systems-of-record workflows with AI-native software.”
Source→“Hi, I'm Andre and welcome to my newsletter Data Driven VC which is all about becoming a better investor with data and AI.”
Source→“Hi, I'm Andre and welcome to my newsletter Data Driven VC which is all about becoming a better investor with data and AI.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.