Before Courtney Trunk chose anything, she demoed ten tools and tried to build it herself twice.
Courtney Trunk runs platform at Motivate Ventures, a Chicago-based early-stage fund with 68 portfolio companies. She started the role in January. Her first project: fix how the firm manages the portfolio.
- Quarterly reportingBeforeSeveral daysWith CuraMinutes
- Quarterly portfolio reviewBefore3 hours, spreadsheet on screenWith Cura2 hours, live on Cura
- KPI parsing per quarterBeforeHours of manual entryWith CuraAutomatic
- OnboardingBefore—With Cura24 hours
Four months of homework
Motivate had been Standard Metrics customers for twelve months. It wasn’t working.
“We weren’t happy with the response rate, and we weren’t happy with the quality of information we were getting. It always felt very, very hard to get founders to respond to KPI requests, to get data from disparate sources into one place, and to have a solid view of what was going on across the portfolio.”
Reporting meant combing through emails, the CRM, Carta, and LinkedIn, then scraping updates together by hand. So in January, Courtney did the evaluation the exhaustive way. She demoed everything on the market — Standard Metrics again, Visible, Totem VC, PortfolioIQ, Foresight, and more. She spent weeks building her own version in Airtable, then tried again in Replit.
“Portfolio management is not what Motivate is on Earth to do. It’s not our secret sauce. It was either going to be me becoming a product manager full time, or not.”
The legacy vendors had a different problem.
“They were clunky and expensive. It felt like I would be signing a big enterprise contract for something that was not going to exist in six months.”
Then she demoed Cura. The note she wrote to her GPs afterward:
“If we hired an engineer to build exactly what we were looking for, this is what I would build.”
Onboarding took a day. She sent over a list of companies. That was the whole setup.
“I think it was 24 hours. If that.”
The three-hour meeting that took two
Every quarter, Motivate runs a PMR — portfolio management review. The whole team in a room, going company by company: who needs attention, what’s changed, internal scoring, markups and markdowns. It used to mean a spreadsheet on the screen and everyone rifling through the CRM mid-meeting.
Last quarter they put Cura on the screen instead.
“Company by company, everybody looking at everything happening. We had three hours blocked and it only took two. To have that much information about every company, even without having talked to the founders, was incredible. Even my GPs were like — how did we do this before we had this?”
KPI collection runs the same way now. About half the portfolio fills out Motivate’s Google form; Cura parses every metric into a clean, structured note in minutes. The other half gets covered anyway — email updates, Granola call notes, Slack messages, and public signal, all landing in the same place.
“The biggest differentiator for us is getting everything from everywhere into the same spot. Proprietary information from our sources, combined with the public data Cura pulls. It’s information we didn’t know we could get, or didn’t know we even needed.”
Reporting went from several days of work to several minutes.
“Maybe several hours if we’re spot-checking and incorporating GP comments. But in terms of report generation, it’s a couple minutes.”
Then the GPs started using it on their own
Most portfolio tools live and die with one admin. At Motivate, the partners got in without being asked.
The firm runs Claude Enterprise connected to Cura’s MCP server. Each GP built their own recurring projects on top of it: portfolio updates pulled for specific LP segments, board prep briefs, a running feed of company milestones.
“All the GPs have different projects that pull the specific updates they’re looking for, because they want to send specific info to specific LPs. They have it on a recurring loop.”
One partner uses it differently. He tracks portfolio wins surfacing on LinkedIn so he can repost them from his own account.
“He has a pretty sizable LinkedIn presence. When he comments on stuff or reposts from portfolio companies, it gets a lot of eyes on it. Previously we didn’t even have this on our radar.”
The same data feeds a function Motivate didn’t have before: a real LP marketing and comms program. Many of Motivate’s LPs are capital markets professionals and family offices with operating businesses — potential customers and advisors for the portfolio.
“Now we can pull exciting updates, share them with select groups of LPs in a more personalized way, and bridge the gap between founders and LPs. Everything we’re doing for current LPs, we’re going to do more of for potential LPs as we fundraise this year.”
The company that had six months left
Cura recalculates runway continuously from every new signal, instead of holding a number collected once a quarter.
“A lot can change in three months with an early-stage startup. If we’re not on a board, sometimes we just find out about catastrophic things after they happen, and there’s nothing we can do. Now I can see they have six months of runway, realize I haven’t talked to them in a while, and get on the phone.”
That’s exactly what happened. Cura flagged a company low on runway that Motivate hadn’t heard from in a while. The team reached out. The founders were still operating and had a handful of customers, but weren’t on a growth trajectory. Courtney introduced them to Motivate’s M&A advisor.
“Now they’re going through diligence on a potential acquisition. Instead of teetering on with a handful of customers until they eventually run out of money, a very qualified founding team with a robust technical product is going to land on their feet somewhere else.”
“I anticipate a lot more stories like that.”
The part nobody puts in the RFP
Platform is a hard function to make legible. It doesn’t close deals and it doesn’t sign wires, and every fund defines it differently.
“Platform is a little esoteric and squishy. Me doing all this work to figure out a better way to manage the portfolio, and coming back with something this robust in this short a period of time — it’s hugely beneficial for us as a fund. But it also made me look really good at this job, in the eyes of my GPs.”
Asked what would break if Cura disappeared tomorrow:
“Our marketing and comms strategy. Our reporting process. Our KPI collection. The comprehensive view I have of what’s going on in the portfolio.”
And on the fear that kept her from signing with a legacy vendor:
“You and your team are hugely responsive. We have calls weekly, feedback constantly in Slack, and you’re shipping things people ask for at a very quick pace. I’d be hard pressed to find any internal engineering team building this fast and this well.”
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