YC / Investor-Portfolio Prospecting

Find companies backed by a specific investor or accelerator (YC, a16z, Sequoia, etc.) that are hiring for a target role, then find contacts and build personalized outbound.

Core insight: VC portfolio data is public

Every major VC and accelerator publishes their portfolio online. Do NOT waste turns trying to discover portfolio companies through Deepline search tools. Instead, fetch the public portfolio page directly and extract company names from it.

This is faster, cheaper, and more complete than any provider-based approach.

What NOT to do (and why)

These approaches were tested in eval runs and all failed or were extremely wasteful:

Do NOT use Apollo to filter by investor

Apollo's q_organization_keyword_tags and q_keywords fields do not reliably filter by investor/accelerator. Searching q_keywords: "Y Combinator" returns mostly irrelevant results. Apollo is great for people search AFTER you have a company list, but cannot produce the company list.