Skip to content

Data Snacks

Definition

Small, productized pieces of data or intelligence that can be shared with founders, intermediaries, or prospects to add value in outreach. The term was used by Kate Hopkins in Ep. 2 to describe bite-sized, reusable insights that a firm packages from its portfolio benchmarking data and market exposure. Dan Herr and Jake Colognesi enthusiastically adopted the term in subsequent episodes. Kate acknowledged the term may have originated elsewhere: "Actually, I think I got it from somebody. I can't remember who."

Origin

Introduced by Kate Hopkins in Ep. 2: Data Snacks — The Unlock to Engaging PE Prospects. Kate describes data snacks as the output of taking a detailed benchmarking report produced for portfolio companies and "parsing it up" into progressively smaller content formats — from 10-page guides down to blog posts, visual snippets, and bullet points that associates can paste into outreach emails or share on LinkedIn. Dan Herr enthusiastically adopted the term: "I've got to start using that — data snacks."

The term was later referenced by Dan Herr in Ep. 20, where Jake Colognesi adopted it enthusiastically: "I love that term... I'm going to steal it."

Application

Kate describes data snacks flowing from a content repurposing cascade (Ep. 2): firms produce detailed benchmarking reports from portfolio company data (SaaS KPIs, org ratios, compensation trends). Internally, the full report is reviewed with all company names visible. For portfolio company CEOs and CFOs, it's anonymized with tailored recommendations. For prospects, it's broken into digestible pieces — a blog post with key findings, visual ratio comparisons for emails, and bullet-point snippets for cold outreach sequences.

Dan provides a concrete example from his time at Serent Capital: packaging hospitality tech data (hotel opening/closure rates from a central reservation system portfolio company, restaurant revenue data from POS system portfolio companies) into market insights that gave prospects a reason to take a meeting.

Jake Colognesi describes Mamba Growth's version in Ep. 20: using their exposure to vertical SaaS companies with embedded payments to bring transparency to an "exceedingly opaque" market — for example, helping founders understand whether their current Stripe deal is competitive relative to peers.

The key principle: data snacks are low-cost for the firm to produce (they already have the data from deal flow and portfolio operations) but high-value for the recipient.