Compass

Inspiration

We were thinking about how day-to-day events affect Venture Capitalists’ (VC) portfolios, and we wanted to make a tool to help with that. VC firms frequently review online news, developing market trends, and pitches from startups to decide who they should invest in. While there are many tools out there that can search through text to help VC firms, there aren’t many that can use videos, especially for a reasonable price. This inspired us to make Compass.

What it does

Compass is a website that evaluates a VC’s portfolio within the context of a video or news article that the VC submits. To do this, the VC would upload their portfolio to the website, which is then given to Claude. Then, they copy a URL of a video or news article, and Claude uses the information presented in that article to give suggestions to the VC firm on how they could change their portfolio. These changes range from suggestions to what companies they should drop, add, or invest in more. Compass can also analyse a pitch video and suggest to the VC whether they should invest in the startup or not.

How we built it

On the frontend, we used React, Tailwind CSS, and Vite for better styling and so we could provide a scaffolding for it. We also used Springboot Security to create a log-in page and Recharts to display useful charts and graphs about a user’s portfolio. As for the backend, we used Supabase, Springboot Java, Postgres SQL, yt-dlp, and JSoup to build it. Whenever you upload your portfolio to Compass, it puts it into a database associated with your information so that you can access it at any time after logging in and see how it's doing. We did this by using xlsx files to extract data from the uploaded portfolio, and then running a Python script to compile all of that information into the database. We used yt-dlp so that we could retrieve the audio and video that was uploaded to Compass and pass that along to the ElevenLabs API to use its speech to text converter to create a transcript and feed that into Claude. Claude would parse through the ElevenLabs transcript and analyze the context. Then, it gives the analysis in text bullet points and specific change suggestions related to companies are listed below with a color coded format.

Challenges we ran into

We had quite a few road bumps while making Compass. Implementing voice to text was challenging. We had to do a lot of testing to get it running. We also ran into several backend issues connecting ElevenLabs to get a comprehensive overview from Claude. Another challenge we had was working with Git. On multiple occasions, we would have problems with trying to push commits to the repo because of a merge conflict or being behind on the branch. We had to perform a hard reset on Git a few times so we could clear the history and get it in a workable state because we didn’t know which commit(s) were causing issues. We were initially planning on using Gemini as well to parse submitted articles, but we ran into runtime issues and issues with the server being busy, even though we were on the Pro Student Plan. As a result, we ended up dropping Gemini and just using Claude instead.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud that we were able to chain all these APIs together and make everything work smoothly, despite the fact that we all didn't have much experience. Compass was able to fully analyze a 36 minute video in just a minute and provide detailed suggestions for all the different companies in a VC’s portfolio based on the video.

What we learned

We learned a lot about using GitHub, APIs, and LLMs in our development process. After bashing our heads against the wall for a few hours, we have memorized what git push, pull, status, and commit do. We also learned not to leave any of our API keys publicly available!! Even though we didn't have much experience working with these tools, we persisted, learned, and overcame, producing a tool that is extremely effective in achieving its goal.

What's next for Compass

In the future, we plan on implementing the portfolio upload feature that Compass is designed for. We also plan to go under the hood and patch out several bugs, such as figuring out why Compass sometimes won’t allow videos to be uploaded to the site.