Zoë VanderWolk

Startups and scaleups are young, fast-growing companies – which means most of their impact is ahead of them. Because we can’t yet measure the future, we need to look at the impact of these companies in the round, not just what impact they’ve already had, but how much they could have as they scale and grow. There’s no substitute for experience here – because we see an average of 1,000 deals a year, we have a knowledge base that feeds into our assessment of the impact our companies will have in the future. That being said, we also have to measure how much impact companies are having right now, which means a careful and thoughtful selection of what we will measure. We don’t want to skip some companies in favour of others just because their impact is easier to measure. We also want to measure the things directly relevant to the deployment of a company’s innovation. So we select impact key performance indicators that are bespoke for each company. There is a natural balance between robustness and precision here, but a common language will emerge over time.