How Silicon Gardens uses Evertrace to source beyond its network

Silicon Gardens knows the value of a strong founder network. For a fund that starts conversations before people have even settled on an idea, those relationships are central to sourcing. The challenge is extending that reach into markets where the team does not yet have the same local connections.

That is where Evertrace fits. Silicon Gardens uses it to screen founders throughout the day, explore different combinations of filters, and move promising opportunities into Attio for the team to follow up.

A founders-for-founders approach to early-stage sourcing

Based in Slovenia, with offices in San Francisco, Zagreb and Belgrade, Silicon Gardens takes a broad approach to sectors while drawing on the experience of its partners and network. In our interview, the fund described both its investment focus and the shared responsibility for finding founders:

We're a founders-for-founders fund based in Slovenia with offices in San Francisco, Zagreb and Belgrade. We look at startups from the earliest possible stages, going so far as to talk to people before they even have an idea of what they want to build. Sector-wise we are agnostic, but tend to look at industries where our partners and our network has the most experience in, so we can help out the founders as much as possible. As for sourcing roles, everyone actively sources - you could say I'm the "first gate" and together with my principal we look at the most potential founders before passing them on to our partners, but it's mostly a joint effort on all fronts.

The challenge: finding tools that extend the network

Personal relationships were already working well. The team had also tested multiple sourcing tools, but speed, coverage and freshness of information remained sticking points.

The personal network angle was and probably always will be the best. But beyond that, we've tried and used multiple tools, tested them extensively, but they never clicked. It was either not pinging quickly enough, not covering enough, or the information wasn't up-to-date. Basically, there was always something that just wasn't clicking right, wasn't "good enough". I'm not saying Evertrace is perfect as is, but it's definitely gunning for that title.

Daily screening, with room to experiment

Evertrace now forms part of a sourcing routine built around several playbooks. The team checks different categories throughout the day and does most of its initial assessment inside Evertrace. Founders who pass that first review get a deeper look, followed by an introduction call or a record of what the team has learned.

Can't really reveal the playbook here hahaha, but we basically have a couple of different ones that we use. Each "category" gets checked throughout the day, most of the assessment is actually done through Evertrace's built-in view. If it passes that initial screening, we go for a deeper dive with our own internal agents. After that research layer is completed, we move forward  with either an intro call or just noting down what we've discovered and enhancing our own dataset. On top of it, there is always one extra category in Evertrace which is experimental and gets changed almost on a monthly basis to figure out some other "filter combos" that may yield good results/hits.

From founder screening to team follow-up in Attio

Screening feeds into a shared process. Weekly reports capture what the team has reviewed, while promising founders move into Attio with an assigned owner. The interview also highlighted a specific improvement the team would like to see in that handover:

Everything we do in Evertrace gets reported and moved to Attio. Every week we create a report of everything we've checked out, as well as moving all potentially good founders to Attio, with owners for each one. That way, everything is in sync. One thing that could def be better here is to have a more detailed input when moving founders to Attio - not just "add a note".

The biggest difference: access to new markets

Asked what had changed so far, Silicon Gardens pointed to geographic reach. With strong visibility in its core markets, the team sees Evertrace as a way to explore opportunities in places where it has less of a local presence.

I would say the biggest change here is just access. While personal networks work best, and we already pretty much know everything that is happening in our core markets, I think Evertrace really opens up access to markets you haven't been to yet. If we want to expand our outreach to other geographies, where we do not have a strong local presence or network, Evertrace can assist us in that with almost zero effort.

For Silicon Gardens, the value is being able to bring its sourcing process into another geography without first having to build the same depth of local connections.

Evertrace in Silicon Gardens' own words

Asked how they would describe Evertrace to another investor, the response was direct:

A sourcing tool that finds founders building new things before they show up anywhere mainstream. Public registries, domains, faculties, social media bios... you name it, Evertrace covers it.

Thank you to the Silicon Gardens team for sharing their workflow and candid feedback. If your fund is looking to find founders beyond its existing network, we would love to show you how Evertrace can support your sourcing.

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