management due diligence
Who are the executives running your portfolio companies?
Do their track records suggest they'll succeed?
Do their skills fit the company's needs?
Do skeletons lurk in their corporate closets?
What We Do
Collected Intelligence is dedicated to helping venture capital, private equity and mutual funds gain a deeper, more complete understanding of the management teams they invest in.
Since 2001 Collected Intelligence has been providing top-tier investors such as New Enterprise Associates and Wasatch Advisors with valuable insights into the backgrounds, skill-sets, management styles and ethics of current and prospective portfolio company executives. We also assist our clients’ portfolio companies with assessing their own potential management hires.
Never has the need to truly know who is running your portfolio companies been so acute. Hyper-competitive markets, the heightened importance of fiduciary duties, and increasingly visible cases of corporate misdeeds and mismanagement have made that painfully clear. But gathering such critical information on the quality and reputations of management teams is extremely time-intensive; meanwhile, the pace of new deals, company visits, quarterly earnings, news releases, road-shows and investor conferences never slackens.
Collected Intelligence helps clients narrow that information gap. Our team of former financial journalists, led by founder Robinson Clark, goes to work “reporting the story” on the target executives’ backgrounds – finding and interviewing sources such as former superiors, peers and subordinates, and sifting through news articles and court records.
We customize our investigation to your needs: What are the executive’s weaknesses? Do his experience, personality and skills fit the company’s needs? How much turnaround work has she done? Has he commercialized a product? Does she build/manage teams well? How does he deal with boards and investors? Does she have legal issues? What else is “out there”?
Each conversation, each key bit of information, becomes a tile in the mosaic we assemble, creating an image of the executives that helps clients see just who it is they would be investing in, backing or hiring, allowing them to make sounder investment decisions.
Working with Collected Intelligence is like having your own investigative reporters on staff. You get the story first, fast and exclusively. We adhere to the hallmarks of good journalism: thoroughness, accuracy and objectivity. And we operate with the utmost sensitivity, allowing investors to kick a company’s tires without damaging relations with management.
If your firm ascribes to the belief that superior management is crucial to superior returns, we invite you to try Collected Intelligence. Many of our clients have made our process a key part of their process.
Testimonials
Collected Intelligence works with a variety of well-established leading VC, private equity and mutual funds, as well as some of their portfolio companies. Our clients put a premium on the quality of management and are driven to truly understand the executives in whom they're investing. They have come to rely on Collected Intelligence to help them gain deeper insights into the people component of their investments.
“Collected Intelligence has repeatedly proven to be a big asset in our efforts to peel the onion on the companies we invest in. We’ve gained tremendous insight into management teams and businesses of our portfolio companies thanks to the work Collected Intelligence has done. Whether revealing or reassuring, their research has been an invaluable complement to all the work we do in-house.”
— Samuel S. Stewart, Jr., Founder of Wasatch Advisors
“Since Collected Intelligence was referred to Simplex by our lead venture capital partner, it has been an integral part of our recruiting process for key executive positions - including VPs and C-level hires. Collected Intelligence has consistently delivered broad perspectives on potential hires, even under very tight deadlines.”
— Ellen R. Hitt, VP, Human Capital, Simplex Healthcare
“Collected Intelligence has been helping Cross Creek Advisors evaluate the management teams of potential private portfolio companies since our inception in 2004. Very little public information is typically available regarding private company managements and avoiding difficult or dishonest executives is critical in any investment but especially when investing in private companies where the outcome is highly dependent on a few executives and financial controls are less mature. Robinson and his team have uncovered some very disturbing information in several diligence cases and helped us avoid investments that would have led to material portfolio losses. While even the best management team does not insure a good outcome in venture investing, avoiding bad teams really improves your odds. We believe Collected Intelligence's services are a critical piece of our diligence process to protect ourselves and our clients.”
— Karey Barker, Managing Director, Cross Creek Advisors
Who We Are
Collected Intelligence is a team of former business journalists with extensive experience in getting up to speed on subjects quickly, developing sources, gathering facts and reporting information in a thorough, objective and timely fashion. Collected Intelligence has a proven track record in providing clients with deeper insight into and understanding of their investments.
Collected Intelligence's roots are in journalism. The firm's founder, Robinson Clark, spent seven years (1993-99) as a financial reporter at Bloomberg News and SmartMoney magazine. He then earned his M.B.A. at Columbia Business School in December 2000. After several months at a boutique investment bank, Clark had the opportunity to begin performing management due diligence services for a mutual fund company in August 2001. He established Collected Intelligence LLC a year later, in 2002.
Clark received his B.A. from Duke University, majoring in English, in 1992.
Contact Us
Collected Intelligence LLC Tel: (917) 902-5842 Email: info@collected-intelligence.com Connect: LinkedIn Web: https://collected-intelligence.com