“I want my users to feel like James Bond... like they can see everything.”
Radar wants to make it 10x easier for private investors to source deals by building an AI that is capable of understanding what they're looking for. I spoke with David about their plan to build the smartest tool in private investing.
Why it matters: PE and VC funds spend enormous time sourcing deals manually. The tools they use today aggregate data but don't understand it. Radar is betting that the gap between "searchable" and "intelligent" is where the real value sits.
The Big Idea
Radar uses AI to model two things simultaneously: what investors actually want, and what companies actually do. Then it connects the two. The difference between a search tool and an intelligence tool is comprehension.
David argues that Radar's edge comes from combining user intent with deep data understanding.
"We understand what the user is doing and what the data actually is. So we combine those two to give much better results."
— David van Vliet
Context: This approach aligns with how recommender systems are evolving. LLMs can now incorporate user-specific signals (preferences, behavioral patterns, item attributes) to produce qualitatively different results from traditional filtering.
'Recommender systems based on large language models...can incorporate external knowledge, particularly information specific to users and items like user preferences, item attributes, and behavioral patterns.'
Source: arXiv: 2410.19744
Zoom in: In practice, Radar's AI can recognize what an investor is actually trying to find, notice connections that a keyword search would miss, and surface opportunities the investor didn't know to look for.
How They Plan to Win
David defines winning as compounding product excellence plus word of mouth. Relentless improvement on one hard, high-value problem. No growth hacks. No premature platform plays.
The intrigue: That strategy is unusually well suited to PE and VC buyers. These funds are densely networked, driven by peer credibility, comparatively rational in their purchasing decisions, highly selective about their tools, and worth a lot over time once they commit. In a market like that, one great user becomes your best salesperson.
David's focus is on making the core product undeniably good before anything else.
"Perfecting that functionality in its most simple but most excellent form..."
— David van Vliet
Paul Graham made the same argument years ago, and it still holds.
'Initially you have to choose between satisfying all the needs of a subset of potential users, or satisfying a subset of the needs of all potential users. Take the first.'
Source: 'Startups in 13 Sentences' by Paul Graham
Zoom out: Total focus isn't just a strategy; it's a daily discipline. Confront problems every day. Avoidance leads to build-up. Build-up kills momentum. The founders who win are the ones who show up every morning and fix what's broken, before it compounds into something unfixable.
What's Next
If Radar's approach sounds interesting, David is happy to connect over LinkedIn.
And you can follow me on LinkedIn for more interviews like this one.