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Hello, everyone. Welcome to Stack Genius, the podcast for data-driven investment professionals. My name is Sylvan, and I greet you warmly wherever you are in the world right now. I'm also greeting Peter Golbokar, who is joining us from Paris from a hotel room somewhere. Thanks for joining us. Good morning, Sylvan. How are you? I'm doing well. Thank you for asking. And I was really curious about dialogue and getting to know you and the technology a little bit. When I looked at it outside in, I looked at the solution, it felt quite comprehensive, both the CRM, but also portfolio management system. I've seen a couple of features in there that I really liked, for example, workflow automations that reminded me of HubSpot a little bit. but also you have catered to due diligence workflows. So I feel those things are pretty cool. What do you think is cool about your solution? so we focused we started with simplicity right this was our core idea simplicity but also extent of the platform there are a few things and i think the first one to start with is that in the investment industry in particular people have been focused only on investing and over the last few years i think we've seen that investing is maybe not enough for investment professionals i think that dpi management Exit management, portfolio management also needs to be shared and needs to be managed within a CRM because otherwise you don't really capture the DNA of what you're doing every day and you don't collaborate on anything else but just investments. And I felt, we felt at Dialog that this is something we needed to address. So we are very, very much comprehensive in terms of the workflows we can do. That's number one. So you can do more things over the lifecycle of your investments with Dialog than you can with any other platform, number one. And number two, simplicity. So as soon as other companies start to go into trying to manage the entire deal flow workflow processes within a firm they become very complicated with lots of things to click with very heavy pages in terms of fields and so on and we definitely started from saying look we want to be completely simple clean for our users so that they have time to think time to work and not are not chasing current you know constantly um things to click and fields and understand what's going on and where the functionalities are As you know, and I think a lot of people who will be watching this video know that very well too, in a lot of firms, CRMs are used by analysts, by secretaries, sometimes associates. But we're the GPs. Right. And then suddenly anyone that's more senior says, ah, this is too complicated for me. You deal with it, which means that actually you lose a huge amount of efficiency and actually you're leaving, you know, a lot of time where, for example, people could be working analysts, associates. They're basically typing in notes that the MDs should be or the partners should be typing in and they're downloading reports for the MDs that they should be able to to be able to see it at a click of a button. And that's also what we tried to do. And we have a lot of experience with that. And I can tell you a story a bit later in time about that. I mean, words are a dime a dozen. So, I mean, what you say sounds awesome. And, you know, other people might claim the same. So can you maybe show us a little bit how that feels like? So how the solution feels and how people would work with it? Sure. So if you look at our platform today, first of all, very simple screen, very, you know, search driven. So we have very deep search, very easy to search on any character, any any piece of information in a memo. in a document etc so no need to go into breadcrumbs to find things we have different types of workflows that you can work with so deal flow this is what 99 of the industry of course has today Investors in particular are all focused on managing their deal flow. Where are the next investments I'm going to find? But what we say is that actually a venture fund, a private equity fund does much more than that. You manage your deal flow, you fundraise for your own fund, you perhaps do M&A and you help people capture the essence of some exit opportunities or bolt-on opportunities within the fund as well. You manage all of your relationships with LPs, investors, advisors, etc. that you want to keep there as well. You do due diligence work. You work with your portfolio companies. including boards, the whole stakeholder ecosystem of a company. And that usually is not captured anywhere. And then, of course, you want to manage your portfolio. So all of these workflows, if you want, are things that you can manage within within dialog. If you look at a company, we created a dummy company called N27. Everybody will recognize that one. The company overviews are very simple. You have tagging, you have coverage, you have affiliations. We have a partnership with Dealroom, which means that you can see all of the data that Dealroom offers within our solution for any company that you enter. And that's, of course, all automatic, et cetera. you see all of the interactions you can manage KPI so a lot of depth around companies but nothing hidden no functionalities that you wouldn't see on this particular screen and then you see all of the projects that you you can manage we're exactly like most CRMs that manage funnels and that manage a deal flow you can see basically that you can have uh an opportunities funnel managed exactly in the same way as in other systems with a Kanban view, etc. All of this will be very usual to you. The important thing, again, is that you can manage multiple projects for a given company, number one. So you can attach a workflow around opportunity when a company is in the funnel. You can attach a workflow around due diligence when you're doing due diligence. You can attach a workflow with a company when you're doing investment management work with that company the other thing we've done also and i was going to mention this in terms of simplicity and integration we've actually brought your inbox into the system and the reason why we've done that and so every user has an inbox in its position basically within dialogue so that you can get much more contextual data around the emails that you receive or that you send. You can send emails directly from here. You can use template emails depending on the type of project. You can automate some of those. So in other words, when you are within your funnel, you can manage, for example, the sending of the same email when you reject an investment, for example, or you can manage the sending of the same email to your LPs with a report. Interesting. and when you spoke about the due diligence piece for example so what other technologies do people come complement yours with so they would still have a vdr somewhere data room that's not yes in dialogue you can save files and it's very important of course to users to be able to access specific files within their crm i think we're not looking to replace vdrs definitely not i think vdrs have a very, very specific to them. I think that every project might require different VDR vendors. Sometimes the company you're looking at has obviously made a different choice to yours and you don't want to impose a VDR. What we are offering to people is the ability to track all of the conversations they have in particular, because documents is one thing. What really matters is all the conversations you have with people that you call about a specific opportunity, whether it's market, whether it's customers, etc. And all of those notes you want to be able to capture within your CRM. I agree. Yeah, I really like the workflow automation that I've seen again outside in. I've never worked with it. So what else is there that people should remember about you guys? So let me just show you this from a different, slightly different perspective. perspective here. So I'll just go back to my email box. So again, the automation is very simple for every person that you get an email from, you can save them as a company, it creates a company very quickly. So all of this is very simple to manage. As soon as you create a new contact and a company, you can essentially attach any email or any thread if you want of emails to a particular to a particular I had a bug here so you'll have to cut this out any email to a workflow or you can actually attach also an entire thread of emails to a workflow and that's very simple you just choose the the workflow here There you go. And now all of these emails from this individual are saved in the system and the future ones as well. So this is definitely a very key feature for us. You can also, of course, write emails. log interactions milestones etc but again what we're really trying to do different is the simplicity of the system with these email integrations we're bringing in calendar integration uh over the next few weeks actually um and so that people will be able to manage all of this um in a very different way from uh in terms of simplicity if you want from what you find in another system The other thing to mention here with Dialog is that because we're very deal-making centric and not just pipeline management centric, the solution is actually also used and usable by investment banking team, corporate finance teams, advisors, or also deal makers. So all of the information that you would typically capture within a system like this, of course around companies and doing deals with companies this is something that we also offer to corporate finance outfits and there it's exactly the same thing so most you know advisors corporate finance advisors will have one CRM to deal with their contacts and their pipelines, etc. But then most people will use spreadsheets to run their deals. And the information sharing is abysmal in a lot of places. And we're helping them replace Excel. Now, I would say in general, the investment banking industry is far behind venture funds and private equity funds in terms of the use of technology. Also because culturally investment bankers haven't been sharing information as easily as smaller teams in private equity and venture. That's fair, yeah. Well, that's helpful. And thanks for painting that picture of both the solution and the users. I try to zoom out again a little bit. I always try to imagine the total tech stack that people would employ that can be counted as best practices. So we just spoke about people using your tool for most of their workflows, for most of their journey. They might have a VDR that they use in the individual projects. I could imagine that people would also use tools for discovery, right? So they would need to look for signals for new investment opportunities. Once they found the signals in another tool, they would somehow import it into Dialog, right? Yeah. So we have two things. First of all, importing signals. data into dialogue is very, very easy. I think that from that standpoint, what we in particular have been working on also is all of the API and open API structure. We're actually, you know, we have integration with Zapier, so you can have your Zaps and all of that part that allows you to connect to outside systems, so lead gen systems, etc. We're looking into other ways to bring in data. I think that most people would like to do LinkedIn scraping and things like this, but a lot of these things are not very legal. So we're also very careful because we work with regulated industries and with DPR constraints, which we're very, very mindful of. But that's why we also work with Dealroom in particular, because Dealroom feeds data, updates data, and they're a very good partner of ours when it comes to providing information. And they're a European data source as opposed to a non-European or US data source. And I think that makes a bit of a difference as well. that where most of your customers are in europe today yes although i have to say we have customers i believe in 19 countries around the world so anything from singapore to texas i think we we have clients in also in terms of variety because of the configurability of all of our workflows we we don't only work with vanilla venture capital funds we work with accelerators, we work with private equity funds, we work with corporate investment teams, we work with investment banks, we work with consulting firms that offer investment banking services, we work with merchant banks that do both investing and advising. So really the entire scope of people who are deal makers, if you want. and and so a lot of variety which we're we're able to to cater for definitely it actually presses a button in my head i mean i'm i've been looking around the industry for a while there's like 600 sas vendors out there you know across the board pure breed crms then you know investment suites like you then pure portfolio management companies tons of productivity tools But it's so scattered. I mean, many of the solutions came out of individual investors having their own software and then spinning it off. And many of them have 100 clients, 200 clients, sometimes 300 clients. There's so many of them out there, right? But it's not like there's a clear winner and it's not like adoption is just happening across the board. Do you have any thoughts why that is? I'm still baffled by how low tech the VC and PE industry is. Yeah, I think, look, it's a very, very simple thing, especially I think that very few teams consider digital and consider CRMs and workflow management tools as something that enhances their productivity. I think that there is still a huge part in the industry of people who consider that actually spending time in front of a computer looking at information is actually not a good use of their time. know i think that the new generations are different and there's automation that can change that if you want and how computers work today and how ai will actually also change that very rapidly so i think that there's going to be a lot of big change in crm and workflow management but you're correct i mean you can choose um you know to do venture investing and and private equity investing you can choose software that's completely not uh you know not applicable to those industries spend a lot of money uh and eventually you know to configure it and to change it and to tweak it and eventually you'll be there i think that there's a lot of people with different experiences and tastes um in this industry The venture industry is a cottage industry still, so very small teams. Every venture capitalist thinks he has an edge over others, and he thinks he has a specific understanding of what a process should look like that is different from others. And therefore you have this segmentation really driven and this kind of pervasive amount of SaaS companies in this space, really driven by how much of a non-standard industry this is. I think it's much less the case in private equity. I think it's much less the case even so in investment banking, where the number of solutions reduces quite a bit. And there, notably, and I'll just make one final point, which I think is very important, anything that relates to permissions that relates to content management, who is able to see what, who is able to do what, etc. These are functionalities that apply to larger companies, and there are very few software companies that can cater for this, and we're one of them, of course. We have a very deep set of permissions and group management and visibility and so on. Maybe just... Double clicking on the point of segmentation a little bit more. I always wonder if there is a wave of consolidation happening at some point or so either mergers or just solutions dying off the market or will it always be like this? I never found an answer. I think that if you look at, well, is the CRM market a VC market today? I think as in a hyper growth market, no. I think that that's one very clear message because you see very few CRM businesses being funded by venture capital. However, I think that where the consolidation happens is on the customer side. So there is vertical integration that is needed. There are a lot of people who provide VDRs, for example, who have access to customers who are quite big. So why don't they actually also provide a CRM solution? There are a lot of providers. So that kind of vertical integration, I think, will happen. because the market is too fragmented and the integrations between those solutions don't really work very well on a vertical basis. Horizontally, I don't think that there is a consolidation, but there are going to be always companies that have more customers, wider reach, et cetera, that execute better from a sales perspective than others. But the vertical integration, I definitely do believe in. Very helpful. Thanks, Peter, both for telling us all the news about Dialog, but also sharing your thoughts on the industry. It's been very enjoyable. So I think you guys sit in London, so I hope you will come back home at some point. Eventually, but, you know, traveling the world, that's what we do when we promote. They have good food in Paris. Exactly. Very good food still. Absolutely. Very good. Peter, thank you so much for your time. It was a pleasure speaking to you. And, you know, we will see each other sometime soon. Sylvain, thank you very much. Take care.

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