Leverage your Network to Help Portfolio Companies

Evan Walden, founder and chief executive of Getro, a jobs and network platform used by around seven hundred venture funds, used the shortest session of the summit to make a straightforward point. Most funds sit on far more network value than they ever put to work, because surfacing it is nobody's actual job.

The stale job board problem, solved automatically. Getro Jobs scrapes every portfolio company's open roles from career pages, LinkedIn, Indeed or manual submissions into one white labelled board matching the fund's own design. Manual boards go stale because maintaining them is nobody's responsibility, and this removes that failure point.

Asymmetric information is the whole pitch. Investors are asked constantly for job and candidate recommendations. A current, branded board turns that trust into a scalable channel instead of a favour granted one email at a time.

Hiring velocity as a health signal. Aggregated posting data gives a fund a leading indicator of which companies are scaling and which are quietly stalling, well before it shows up in a board deck.

Turning the team's LinkedIn into a database. Getro Connect pools every team member's first degree connections into one searchable tool with filters LinkedIn does not offer. Evan's example was finding everyone who worked at Uber between 2012 and 2014, exactly the query a founder reference check needs.

Shareable, protected contact lists. Funds can build standing lists, such as an automatically updating list of CMO candidates, and share them securely with founders who need to hire quickly.

Tracking whether introductions actually land. The platform flags when a fund's contacts change jobs into a portfolio company, turning a claimed introduction into a measurable outcome rather than an anecdote.

The same infrastructure works for vendors. Using those lists as an onboarding book of vetted service providers for new portfolio companies came up as a natural extension, turning a repeated favour into a repeatable playbook.

• Evan Walden, Founder and Chief Executive, Getro.

This session was part of the IndianVCs Venture Summit, three days of conversations with more than twenty investors and allocators on LP fundraising, portfolio support, and the tools reshaping how funds operate. The full set of recordings lives on our YouTube channel.

The underlying point outlasts the specific product. A fund's network is a real asset sitting idle until somebody builds the plumbing to make it searchable, shareable and trackable, and most funds have never built that plumbing.