Isaac Arnold, Vice President at 11 Tribes Ventures, manages performance data for 51 portfolio companies across two funds. Visible Requests handle the firm’s structured reporting, but plenty of valuable data still shows up outside a Request: a P&L pasted into an email, a PDF board deck, a spreadsheet with tabs named whatever the CFO felt like that month.
Isaac doesn’t open any of those to pull numbers anymore. He tags the email, and Claude takes it from there.
“Almost nothing I put into Visible is typed by hand. Claude extracts the metrics and uploads them into Visible through the MCP.”
This isn’t a downloadable skill. It’s a workflow you set up once in Claude Cowork, using the Visible MCP, your email connector, and a single inbox label. After that, it runs on its own.
How It Works
When an update comes in that Isaac wants in Visible, he adds a label called “Claude Visible Extraction.”
From there, Claude picks it up automatically and:
Reads the email and every attachment, from the body text to slide 14 of the board deck.
Extracts every quantitative metric and every qualitative update.
Pulls the metrics Isaac tracks in Visible for that company and maps each number to the right one. Founders rarely use your metric names, so if an email says “revenue” and Visible tracks “Net Revenue,” Claude makes the match.
Compares the new values against that company’s history and flags anything that changes dramatically.
Uploads everything into Visible through the MCP.
The label is what keeps you in control. Claude only touches what you tag, so nothing lands in Visible that you didn’t choose to send.
Set It Up
The Visible MCP connected in Claude
Your email connector (Gmail or Outlook) connected in Claude
Claude Cowork
A label in your inbox to act as the trigger
Your metrics already set up for each company in Visible
Create the label, then set up a recurring task in Claude Cowork that checks for newly labeled emails and processes them.
Here are the instructions Claude follows. Adjust them to fit your firm.
“Check my inbox for emails with the label “Claude Visible Extraction” that haven’t been processed yet. For each one, read the email and all attachments, identify which portfolio company in Visible it’s from, and extract every quantitative metric and qualitative update. Pull the metrics I track in Visible for that company and map each extracted number to the matching metric, even when the names differ. Use the reporting period stated in the update. Compare each value to prior periods in Visible and flag anything that changes dramatically. Upload the metrics to Visible through the MCP and save the qualitative updates as a note on the company. When you’re done, summarize what you uploaded for each company, anything you flagged, and anything you couldn’t confidently match."
Once it’s running, your job is just the tagging.