Small corporate venture arm

• The CFO asks for a quarterly portfolio performance pack and the venture lead realizes the spreadsheet cannot produce one without a week of chasing.
• An annual strategy or board innovation review is scheduled and the unit needs credible KPI history per portfolio company, with sources, on short notice.
• The unit crosses roughly 15 positions and update collection stops fitting in one person's inbox.
• An audit or impairment review asks where a revenue number came from and nobody can point to the founder email it was typed from.
• A CVC-as-a-service contract ends or is questioned on cost, and the unit looks for software that covers the monitoring slice at a fraction of a managed-services retainer.

Tier fit. 20 companies lands exactly on the Portfolio tier at $199/mo flat, zero overage: 20 included companies and 10 seats, far more than a 1-3 person team needs. Assumed churn 2.0%/mo, lifetime 50 months, GM-adjusted LTV $7,960, target CAC $2,653. All estimates, per the Economics page.

Payback. At about $159/mo gross margin (80%): referral at ~$150 pays back in about a month, inbound at ~$200 in under two, content at ~$290 in under two. Even high-touch outbound at ~$1,980 fits inside the $2,653 ceiling on paper. The constraint is not the CAC ceiling. A Cycle score of 2 means the sales cost is time and procurement paperwork, not media spend, and that cost does not show up in channel CAC tables.

Expansion. Modest. A small CVC adds 2-6 positions a year, so overage at $8/company/mo produces slow structural expansion (25 companies would be $239/mo); exits and write-offs offset some of it. Seat expansion is near zero at a 1-3 person team. Labeled as an estimate: expansion here is the weakest of the ten ICPs' mechanical growth stories except the family office.

One honest caveat. The 2.0%/mo churn assumption reflects corporate stability, but a single event (unit shut down, strategy pivot, parent acquired) removes the account entirely; corporate venturing units have a known mortality problem when parent priorities shift.

Director of Corporate Ventures at a $600M industrial components maker. A fictional composite, not a real person.

Sam runs an $18M evergreen program with one analyst who is half-borrowed from FP&A. Eighteen positions, two boards, quarterly reporting to a CFO who reads every footnote. The quarter-end ritual: chase eleven founders by email, get four PDFs, two decks, one Google Sheet link, and four silences, then retype numbers into the master spreadsheet the CFO's team audits by asking where cell F14 came from. Sam buys when a tool can show the source document behind every number and produce the quarterly pack without the analyst losing a week, and when it costs little enough to go on a corporate card or a one-line PO. Sam churns when the parent restructures, when IT demands the vendor complete a 200-question security review it cannot justify, or when a new CFO consolidates tooling onto whatever the corporate standard is.

• "IT requires SSO/SAML and a vendor security review." Honest concession: PostMoney has no SSO story or compliance packet today, and building a security-questionnaire practice for $199/mo accounts is exactly the trap the Janz framework warns about. If the process is longer than the price justifies, disqualify politely. This is the segment's stated disqualifying signal.
• "We need valuations, ownership waterfalls, and impairment support for the parent's books." Honest counter: out of scope by design; PostMoney starts after the check is written and does monitoring and reporting, not fund accounting. Pair with the parent's finance systems or a fund-admin provider; do not pretend.
• "Our managed-services provider already does this." Honest counter: a Touchdown-style retainer covers sourcing and back office at managed-services cost; PostMoney covers the monitoring-and-reporting slice at software cost. For a unit that keeps investing in-house but drops the retainer, PostMoney is the cheap keep-the-lights-on layer. Concede that a unit happy with full-service outsourcing has no reason to buy.
• Lifecycle risk: churn here is event-driven, not gradual. Unit shutdowns, parent acquisitions, and CFO tooling consolidations delete the account in one decision. The 2.0%/mo assumption is an average over a lumpy distribution; label it as such.