Marco Squarci
Founder and CEO of Specter | e/SpecterHQ
29 Nov 2025etn. at Como 1907 Ventures Day
Spectre Founders Marco & Dominic: Bootstrapped Private-Market Intelligence
After a short break of set banter about the table, scarves, and last night's group dinner, the hosts welcome Spectre founders Marco and Dominic in person. They cover the founding journey from Amsterdam and Southeast Asia to London, Spectre's real-time signals on private companies with 350+ VC and PE clients, aggressive hiring across GTM and engineering, and expansion into private equity and investment banking — including one of the two biggest investment banks paying within 16 hours of first demo. They explain why they stayed bootstrapped, hiring for attitude over credentials, and tease 2026 plans.
12 Nov 2025EF’s Matt Clifford Specter CEO TechCrunch #1 hire Anthropic Europe a16z media SoftBank NVIDIA shift
Marco Scorsi (Spectre): Bootstrapped Live Market Intelligence
Spectre co-founder and CEO Marco Scorsi tells the origin story: he and co-founder Dom built an early prototype in an Amsterdam kitchen scraping hiring and product data, friends in VC asked to use it, and the proudly bootstrapped company later decamped across Southeast Asia before settling in London. He walks through Spectre's hundreds of alternative signals across companies, people and investors, the new real-time revenue-mentions feed with confidence scoring to handle inflated founder claims, and use cases from GPs winning deals to BDRs, arguing data-driven VC is already over in favor of AI-driven VC — before his connection drops mid-interview.