WATCH: Collin West talks next-gen VC on the VC10X podcast with Prashant Choubey

"Conventional VC is a 20th century invention. It's doesn't scale into the 21st century." – Collin West

In his recent appearance on the VC10X Podcast, Ensemble founder Collin West laid out the art of data-driven venture and the future of the industry.As we've said many times before, there's a lot more to our approach than just collecting data. Over the last decade, Ensemble has been at the forefront of developing the processes integral to converting data insights into actionable, outbound strategies.

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The goal has always been to find, pick, and win access to generational companies, while eliminating low-value, redundant networking processes that the industry has depended on since its early development.The truth is:

• Venture won’t survive if it tries to be the one industry in the world to resist the new reality of data saturation.
• VCs lose too much money, and the asset class suffers from a deep lack of innovation—even as we claim to back the world’s great innovators.

In this episode of the VC10X podcast, Ensemble co-founder Collin West breaks down how data, software, and structure are rewriting the rules of venture capital, and breathing new life into an industry in need of an overhaul.

"VCs lose money at an embarrassing rate. In what other industry would we accept–or even celebrate–failure rates of 80%, sometimes 90%. Let's just admit that the old way of investing... isn't scalable.'"

For all of venture’s talk about innovation, the actual process behind most investments hasn’t changed in decades: backchannel references, gut feelings, warm intros. It’s a model that rewards access, not insight—and it breaks down at scale.

The truth is, venture is in jeopardy. Not because it can’t generate big wins, but because it loses money too often. That’s why six times more capital flows into buyouts—despite the fact that top-decile venture returns outperform. The difference? Buyout firms don’t lose money. The asset class is hungry for a more consistent approach. Ensemble is building the infrastructure to deliver exactly that: data-informed decisions, process-driven sourcing, and a system designed to reduce loss while keeping the upside intact.

"When humans look at a startup, we're generally pretty correct on the things that correlate with success. But our brains can't handle that much data. We treat everything as binary."

Collin cuts to the core of what’s broken in traditional venture: the human mind is capable of insight, but not of scale. We flatten complex founder signals into “yes” or “no,” “backable” or “not,” all while convincing ourselves we’re exercising judgment. In truth, we’re guessing — and guessing doesn’t scale.

That’s why Ensemble was built: not to replace the investor’s gut, but to free it from the trap of false clarity. Our data platform ingests thousands of signals across founding teams, allowing us to quantify nuance without defaulting to binary shortcuts. It’s not about eliminating judgment — it’s about giving judgment the raw material it needs to outperform.

“If you think about my pie chart of time — instead of 90–95% being spent meeting random companies, I now spend it actually helping my companies, doing board work, all these things. I have more time to do the traditional aspects of venture investing.”

This quote captures one of the biggest misconceptions about data-driven venture: that it’s cold, detached, or overly mechanized. In reality, Ensemble’s system is designed to restore time to the investor — by taking care of the heavy lift of sourcing and filtering, we free our team to actually do the parts of the job that matter: conviction, support, board work, and true partnership.

When your sourcing engine is built on software, you don’t need to take 500 meetings to find your next deal. And when you’re not chasing pipeline, you can focus on what LPs actually pay for: building conviction early, backing the best founders, and going deep once you’re in.

"It turns out, if you stay focused on a mission for a decade — 13 years now, for me — what you dreamed could happen, what you pitched to investors for years and years, what you lost sleep on, what you continued to pursue in the face of so many doubters… eventually, that decade arrives.”

At Ensemble, we often say we had to build the models — and then wait. For years, we refined our data platform, ranking teams no one else was noticing. That patience looked strange in a momentum-driven market. But in retrospect, it was the only sane way to do venture.

What Collin describes is the hard truth of building a firm from scratch around a contrarian thesis. The AI-native, fully integrated investing platform we use today wasn’t possible until the infrastructure — and the market — caught up. But now that the world is seeing how venture has to evolve, Ensemble is years ahead, with the track record to prove it.