Connor Murphy

I’ve been involved in Venture as a Founder, Vendor, Mentor, EiR, Investor and even a micro-LP since 2009. I started as a Founder in the remotest part of Ireland (sheep, sea and wifi) with zero VC network or fundraising experience. I ran the most inefficient, stupid and backwards fundraising process I’ve ever seen. Luckily we ended up raising $5.5M dollars, first via a family office / PE firm, then a VC, then a corporate VC and finally via an amazing angel - in that order 🤦

I knew NOTHING, was optimising for all the wrong things and wasted so much time and energy. At one crucial point I turned down term sheets from 2 of the top VC firms in the world, as I was clueless about what the “right investor” for my stage looked like, and sadly by the time I started to figure it out, it was too late, and we ended up selling Datahug (our startup) which is now part of SAP.

Determined to help others avoid my mistakes (and for me to better understand my own mistakes a.k.a. self therapy) I started mentoring other first time Founders, introducing them to the right mentors and investors at the right time, and eventually joining Techstars as an MD. At Techstars I got to invest and work with 1000’s of founders, mentors, colleagues and investors from all over the world.

Rightly or wrongly, I kept discovering that Network was key to success at every stage of venture. Network was how VCs mostly met their LPs, Network was how GPs mostly got their jobs at VC firms, Network was how GPs mostly sourced their best deal-flow, Network was how GP’s mostly helped Founders, and Network was how Founders mostly learnt and how they sourced their early hires and customers. Spot a pattern? 🙂

Not only was I able to observe this anecdotally, but while at Datahug we were able to quantitatively measure the impact of network on Venture. I’d come from the Management Consulting industry so was looking to help large professional services clients like KPMG, CAA, CBRE, SV Bank etc… replace both LinkedIn AND Salesforce to manage their professional relationships better. We did this automatically by organising and scoring every relationship in a firm's network by mining email, calendar and call interactions. TechCrunch described this as “LinkedIn on Steroids”, and luckily (i.e. accidentally) as we pitched VCs to invest, they frequently related to the pain, and quickly became customers. Invoice-based financing FTW 😇

Working as a “big data” vendor with hundreds of VCs gave us a whole new insight into the industry. By mining billions of interactions and working with firms everywhere we got some unique insights into how venture and other professional services sectors worked. As an example, people in VC interact with 3X more people per year than any other industry. At the time we were working with the biggest talent agencies in Hollywood (Network), the big 4 Global accounting firms (Network), the biggest commercial real estate firms (Network) and so many other knowledge (aka Network) driven industries, yet VC kept coming out on top in terms of network density per employee. Quite simply, we learnt that if you want to re-invent networking, starting in venture is the place to start. No other industry or sector relies on network more.

And this brings us to Bridge. By combining all of our experience, errors and insights, we’ve started with the network collaboration needs of the venture industry.  Our vision is to expand from there and help 1B+ people collaborate with their networks by 2030.

Thank you for joining us on the journey. If we can help in any way, or if you have any feedback or questions, please reach out and say hello.

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