How Theory Ventures Eliminated Copy-Paste Research with Horizon
Meet Theory Ventures
Theory Ventures is an investment firm where research is everything. Their team maintains extensive documentation as they evaluate companies, and their investors wanted to use LLMs to work more effectively with this knowledge base. Adam Conway, a Senior AI Engineer at Theory, led the effort to transform how the team interacts with their research.
The Copy-Paste Problem
Before Horizon, the workflow was painfully manual. "We maintain a lot of documents as we're researching companies," Adam explained. "Our investors wanted to use LLMs to work with these documents, which ended with them doing lots of copy and pasting."
The friction was constant. "They'd go into Notion, they'd go into the CRM Affinity, they'd copy the information they needed into ChatGPT, and then they would work on the memo they're generating, and then they would copy that back into Notion."
Every research session meant context-switching between tools, manually shuttling information, and losing flow state in the process.
Bringing Everything Into One Place
Horizon changed the equation. "We basically used Horizon to bring all of that into a single place that they could work with."
By building custom MCP tools, Theory Ventures connected their LLM interface directly to their knowledge systems. "Because we've built these bespoke MCP tools with Horizon, I can stay in my LLM chat UI for a lot longer and get the information I need directly without having to tab through all these different places to copy and paste the information in."
Building Blocks That Compose
The real power emerged when individual tools started working together.
"I have an MCP tool that lets me write a document outlining a market about a set of companies," Adam said. These discrete capabilities—reading from the CRM, writing documents, querying research—became building blocks.
"Those are two individual building blocks of things that we need at Theory. And what has become capable because of Horizon that we didn't explicitly plan for is the LLM now gets to use both of those tools to work autonomously."
The tools weren't just replacing manual steps—they were enabling new workflows that emerged from their composition.
Central to the Roadmap
For Theory Ventures, Horizon has become foundational. "I would say it's one of the most central pieces of our roadmap going forward," Adam noted.
What started as a solution to the copy-paste problem evolved into the infrastructure for autonomous research workflows.
Key Results
- Eliminated context-switching: Investors stay in their LLM interface instead of bouncing between Notion, CRM, and chat tools
- Enabled autonomous workflows: Individual MCP tools compose into capabilities the team didn't explicitly plan for
- Became central to roadmap: Horizon is now one of the most important pieces of Theory's technical strategy
Lessons for Research-Heavy Teams
Theory Ventures' experience highlights a pattern: the copy-paste workflow is a symptom of disconnected tools. Every time someone manually moves information between systems, there's an opportunity for MCP to bridge that gap.
More importantly, the tools you build can unlock capabilities you didn't anticipate. When an LLM can both read from your knowledge base and write to it, entirely new workflows become possible.
Try Horizon Today
Ready to eliminate copy-paste from your research workflows? Get started with Horizon and build MCP tools that connect your LLM to the systems where your work actually lives.