Aditi Dash and Joe Hovde (CircleUp) - Balancing data with founder-market fit when investing in consumer brands

My guests today are Aditi Dash and Joe Hovde from CircleUp. CircleUp Growth Partners is an early-stage consumer fund that takes a data-driven approach investing in compelling companies. Aditi is one of the investment partners and Joe is one of the data analysts. This is a fascinating conversation about building a data base for the private markets and using that data base as a tool to help make investment decisions and discover trends in CPG.Some of the questions I ask Aditi and Joe:Let's start at the beginning. What was each of your attraction to working with consumer brands and the private markets?For those that aren't familiar walk us through a little bit of the history of Circle Up.One of the difficulties in the private markets is that company information is private. I understand that you are building a platform to help make investment decisions based on data, but what's that process of convincing a company to share its metrics and data with you?How has the platform helped make investment decisions?What are some of the ways that you've been able to leverage data?What is the relationship between data and how you make decisions when it comes to investing?How do you make sure you don't overindex on the data when analyzing a company to invest in?What are the most important metricsHas the platform led to help you discover new trends?What are some of the trends that you are most excited about?Walk us through your due diligence process.What makes a strong founding team?What's one thing that you would change about venture capital?What's the best piece of advice that each of you've received?What's one piece of advice that you have for founders?