Welcome back to Office of the Venture CFO, where we talk to the people actually running finance at top venture firms.
If you missed our first issue with Healy Jones from NEO (SB 54, SPVs, and manufacturing liquidity), you can catch it here.
This month, we’re sitting down with Dave Rivinus, CFO, COO, and Head of Capital Formation at 01 Advisors.
Dave came up through public equities, did IR at Yahoo during a wild time for that company, helped take Twitter public alongside managing partners Adam Bain and Dick Costolo, and then jumped to help them build 01 from scratch.
His perspective on bringing public-market-grade transparency to venture is something every fund should hear.
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FROM PUBLIC MARKETS IR TO VENTURE CFO
Venture5: Your path to venture CFO is pretty different from most. Can you walk us through how you got here?
Dave: I’ve always had this interest in the capital markets and how they’re evolving. I started as a public equities investor and analyst on the sell side, then the buy side at a small-cap firm in San Francisco. In the downturn of ’08–09, I left that and went to get my operator chops, starting at Yahoo where I landed the investor relations seat — at a very interesting time for that company. Then I got to join Twitter and got to know Adam Bain and Dick Costolo. What we saw at Twitter was fascinating — it was one of those first companies in the post-2012 JOBS Act cohort where cap tables could just expand dramatically. Companies could get much bigger and take a lot more capital in the private markets. Sitting in that IR and corp dev seat, watching how a company could grow in the private markets and then enter the public markets — I found it so fascinating. When Dick and Adam were getting back together in 2018 to start 01, I jumped at the chance to help them build it.
Venture5: You did IR on the public side for a long time. When you flipped to private, was there anything that surprised you?
Dave: There’s actually a lot of similarities. I think the surprising thing was how much of what I learned on the public side translated directly. The level of reporting, data, disclosure, being transparent with your investments and your portfolio — taking some of those IR principles from the public world into the funds side has been received really well. And I think it’s particularly helpful now, with so many new entrants as LPs trying to evaluate new venture funds. When you can give a much greater level of detail into the portfolio, into the companies, talk about specifics on portfolio construction — that’s a real differentiator.
“Taking IR principles from the public world into the funds side has been received really well.”
VALUATIONS: SHOWING YOUR WORK
Venture5: You mentioned valuations as an area where transparency really matters. How do you approach that?
Dave: Valuations in private markets are in many ways very theoretical. There’s no market to mark these investments to. A lot of firms will take the last round mark and put that in and say, okay, this is what the portfolio is worth. But obviously since 2021, a lot of those valuations are stale — based on metrics that may not be applicable today. What we started doing is providing both our own internal marks and the last round marks. So we’re showing two sets of numbers, and an LP can really see what’s going into the sauce when you’re valuing a portfolio.
Venture5: At a high level, what does that internal methodology look like?
Dave: For the most part, we’ll use public comps where we can. We write up our valuation process and then write up our valuation summary, so an LP can look through that and understand why we marked a company a particular way. They’ll see the comps we used. We’re trying to set a level of transparency that says, hey, as an LP, you make the decision of what this portfolio is worth. We think this is where it’s going, here’s the market mark, and here’s enough information that you can form your own view.
“We always carried our own internal marks, but now we’re providing our own internal marks and those last round marks [to LPs].“
Venture5: Where can firms get tripped up on valuations, especially if the CFO, COO, and IR roles are split across different people?
Dave: I’m glad you asked that. One of the benefits of sitting across these roles is that I can connect the dots between the investment thesis, the financials, and the story we tell LPs. When this role gets divided — and it will as firms grow — that gets much harder. You really have to rely on good note-taking, good investment memos, and good reporting from the companies. Without that information sharing, you can get tripped up by not truly understanding what a company is and why you invested.
Venture5: SaaS comps have been getting hammered recently. How does that affect your next round of marks?
Dave: We’ll see when we get to Q1. In general, one of our goals is to be realistic about valuation but also to smooth out the volatility. We’re not marking to market every day. We’re trying to look for averages and baselines we can track to, rather than a single point-in-time snapshot.
COACHING PORTFOLIO COMPANIES THROUGH FUNDRAISING
Venture5: You’ve helped Navon through its IPO, and you work with portfolio companies on Series C and beyond. What does that look like in practice?
Dave: We’re a team-focused operation. We all work across our portfolio companies. When a company is going out to talk to investors, we’re making introductions, reviewing their pitch materials, reviewing their deck, looking at their metrics, and helping them understand how to tell their story — both how they got there and more importantly where they’re going. With Navon specifically, Ariel and the team built an amazing company, and given our public markets background, we were able to offer advice on storytelling, how to approach public market investors, and how the conversation changes as you move from private to public.
“Understanding the perspective of the next investor you’re going to talk to is the biggest thing.”
Venture5: Are there patterns you see when portfolio companies are preparing for their next round? Things they consistently need to tweak?
Dave: The biggest thing is understanding the general set of questions at each stage. The questions evolve pretty meaningfully along the way. A company typically knows the prior set of questions — they know the seed questions before they talk to the Series A investor, or they know the A and B questions but don’t yet know the growth or pre-IPO questions. Helping them understand the perspective of the next group of investors is the key. And it’s fluid — in 2020 and 2021 you had public market investors flowing into A and B rounds and even into seed. So it’s not always clean buckets. It’s about understanding where that specific investor is coming from.
SCALING FINANCE AND OPS ACROSS MULTIPLE FUNDS
Venture5: Take us back to Fund 1. What did finance and ops look like when 01 was just getting started, and what changed as you scaled?
Dave: At the Fund 1 level, you’re a startup. It’s relatively simple — one fund, in our case 20 investments, certainly no distributions. Not a lot of capital flow, not a lot of reporting. You can rely on outsourcing, part-time consultants, friends, and your network. The big change is when you start to add funds. This part of the business doesn’t actually scale very well — it grows linearly. An investment team can in some sense move on to the next fund and leave the prior one behind. But finance and ops needs to keep paying attention to everything across all the funds.
“This part of the business doesn’t actually scale very well — it grows linearly.”
Venture5: Any advice on how to get ahead of that scaling problem?
Dave: Bring in people before you need them. Our CFO at Twitter used to say two things: make your footprint bigger than your foot, and run after problems. We look for people who embody that. It’s about running after things before they come up. You may not be doing distributions yet, but get those banking relationships in place now. Understand what it’s going to look like to set them up when you need them. And honestly, your network as a CFO or COO is just as important as anybody else’s at the firm. You never know what’s going to come up, so build that network early.
AI IN VENTURE: WHERE IT’S WORKING AND WHERE IT’S NOT
Venture5: AI is obviously a huge investment theme, but what about inside the firm? Who owns AI adoption at O1, and where are you seeing real impact?
Dave: We look at it in two universes: the investment side and the back office. On the investment side, the promise is using AI to mine all the companies out there and screen for the best investments. Candidly, I don’t think we’ve seen that work yet — the data set is just tough to put together. But on the back office side, we’re definitely making progress. We’re using tools on the CRM side — I’ll make a plug for a portfolio company, Attio, which we think has a fantastic CRM tool. That’s really helpful when one or two people are managing a whole bunch of relationships. And we’re experimenting with memo writing — taking notes and diligence from a deal and putting it into memo form. Those are areas we’ve been exploring.
The full conversation goes deeper on how Dave thinks about building his network as a CFO, what he learned sitting in the IR seat as Navon went public, and how 01 approaches smoothing out valuation volatility when public comps swing hard. Watch it above.
