The Stupid Work: Where VC Analyst Time Actually Goes

• Sahil Harwani
• July 23, 2026
• Blog
• 0 Comments

The Stupid Work: Where VC Analyst Time Actually Goes

Across multiple calls with Venture Capital and Private Equity fund teams, the consistent finding is that writing the IC memo is not where analyst time goes – an estimated 30-40% of investment team hours disappear into logging, chasing, and reformatting instead. Buying another CRM doesn’t fix this, because CRMs log relationships, not deals or portfolio health. The fix is a system that ingests, parses, and flags on its own – the connective tissue, automated.

I’ve now sat in 50+ calls with VC fund teams. Seed funds, Series A specialists, growth funds, a couple of family offices.

There’s a thing nobody says in public but almost everybody says on a call once they relax: the IC memo is not the bottleneck.

Every GP, pushed past the polite answer, lands in the same place. “Writing the memo is P2. P1 is the stupid work.”

An inventory of the stupid work

Compiled directly from those calls – none of this is hypothetical:

• Logging every inbound deal into a CRM nobody quite agreed to use, so half the pipeline lives in one associate’s inbox instead.
• Chasing portfolio founders for MIS submissions every month – one analyst described it as “running a collection agency with an MBA.”
• Building a new Excel tracker for every portfolio company, because the last company’s tracker doesn’t quite fit.
• Screenshotting monitoring alerts into a Slack channel where they scroll away forever.
• Chasing founders three weeks after the wire to confirm conditions precedent are actually done.
• Nudging your lawyer to nudge their lawyer.
• Resizing the same deck for the fourth different LP meeting this quarter.

Individually, each task is twenty minutes. Collectively, across the funds we’ve spoken to, this coordination layer eats an estimated 30-40% of investment team time. High-cost people, low-value work.

One fund had 22 portfolio companies tracked in a Google Sheet built in 2019. Three tabs were broken. The partner found out a portfolio company was in trouble when the founder called him. That’s not a monitoring failure. That’s the system working exactly as designed – because there was no system.

“But we have a CRM for this” – no, you have a different tool for a different job

This is the objection we hear most, so it’s worth being direct about it. Yes, plenty of these funds already pay for a CRM – usually Affinity, sometimes TagHash, sometimes a stitched-together Notion-and-Airtable stack. And yes, these are often genuinely good at what they’re built for: relationship graphs, warm-intro mapping, “who at our fund knows this founder.”

But look at what’s actually in the inventory above. None of it is a relationship-mapping problem. A CRM doesn’t parse a founder’s MIS PDF. It doesn’t flag that a portfolio company’s burn just crossed the covenant line. It doesn’t tell you a new deal looks like the three that died at gate 2 last year for the same reason. That’s not a missing feature – it’s a different category of job, and funds are often paying premium-CRM prices for a job the CRM was never built to do.

And the prices are real. Public reporting consistently puts relationship-intelligence CRMs like Affinity at roughly $2,000–$2,700 per seat, per year, with an effective floor near $20,000 annually even for a very small team, and reported renewals for a 10-person fund landing well past $60,000 once tier and add-ons are counted. That’s before you’ve automated a single MIS submission or caught a single covenant breach. A ten-person investment team is often paying more for the CRM than it would cost to hire another junior analyst – for a tool that still leaves the actual stupid work exactly where it was.

Why smart funds tolerate it anyway

Because the stupid work is invisible in aggregate. No line item says “MIS chasing: 340 hours/year.” It leaks out in fifteen-minute increments across everyone’s calendar, so it never becomes anyone’s problem to fix – and it’s easy to mistake “we have a CRM” for “we have a system,” when the CRM was never solving this particular problem in the first place.

And because the industry’s AI conversation has been aimed at the wrong end for two years. The pitch has been AI for investment decisions – better memos, faster analysis. But decisions were never where the time went. The time went into the connective tissue between decisions: the logging, the chasing, the reformatting, the reminding.

You hired an IIT/IIM graduate for their analytical mind. Day 90, they’re chasing MIS again. Sharp analytical mind; glorified follow-up machine.

What the fix actually looks like

Not another CRM – that’s more logging, not less. The pattern that works is making the system do the remembering, and increasingly, the reasoning:

• Deals that log themselves when they enter the pipeline, with data room files indexed automatically on connection.
• MIS that gets ingested and parsed the moment the founder uploads, with guardrails that alert on exceptions (burn above plan, runway under 12 months, churn spiking) instead of a human reading every submission line by line.
• Monitoring that runs continuously against defined sources and surfaces only what crosses a relevance threshold – into a structured feed, not a screenshot graveyard.

This is the difference between a system that stores what your fund has done and one that starts to function like your fund’s own institutional brain – noticing that this deal rhymes with three others, that this founder’s burn pattern looks like the one that blew up last year, without a partner having to remember it personally.

In CompeteWiser, this is the unglamorous layer we built first, precisely because no one else wanted to. Portfolio companies auto-sync their MIS; the system parses it, updates the metrics, and flags exceptions against guardrails you set. Monitoring sweeps run on your cadence across your sources. The pipeline updates itself as deals move through gates – and it sits alongside your existing CRM rather than demanding you rip it out on day one.

None of this is the exciting part of AI. It’s the part that gives your analysts their week back.

The funds that win the next decade won’t just be the ones with the best judgment. They’ll be the ones whose smart people spend their hours on judgment – because the stupid work finally got a system.

Curious what 30-40% of your team’s time is actually worth? Email at sahil@theprodzen.com.