How AI Agents are Changing Investing
Lonsdale interviews John Melas-Kyriazi, CEO of Standard Metrics, about how AI agents are transforming venture capital and private markets investing. The conversation covers concrete workflows—from due diligence acceleration to portfolio management automation—and reveals how founders and investors are already using Claude, ChatGPT, and specialized tools to compress months of work into hours, while maintaining competitive advantages through network effects and proprietary data.
Key takeaways
- • AI as a technical co-pilot lets investors go deep into unfamiliar domains within hours by asking models to explain papers and research at an undergraduate level, then bringing in human experts for final verification rather than scrambling to assemble teams over days or weeks.
- • Use Excel + Claude integration to automate financial modeling—portfolio companies can build discounted cash flow analyses automatically by connecting their data to Claude, reducing manual spreadsheet work.
- • Data network effects are a durable moat even as AI commoditizes software: Standard Metrics' 10,000+ companies create a flywheel where new investor customers gain 40%+ of their portfolio data already in the system, lowering switching costs and friction.
- • AI agents orchestrated across multiple tools (calendar, Notion, CRM) can automatically surface data for board meetings—pulling portfolio metrics, building agendas, and creating prep documents from a single prompt with Model Context Protocol integration.
- • Engineers, designers, and product managers are now shipping working prototypes faster by using Claude and Cursor to code simultaneously, collapsing feedback cycles and enabling non-engineers to contribute pull requests and test edge cases.
- • Content strategy is shifting toward AI discoverability: Standard Metrics now creates LLM-optimized content specifically engineered for agents to recognize and recommend the product when people ask models how to do investment workflows.
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