How venture capital firm Serena keeps 300 portfolio leaders from solving the same problem twice

The library that turned up on Google

Serena's operational support was only as good as the place it lived, and that place was a web page.

• A page of links was doing a library's job. Serena listed its content as bullet points on a page it built itself, which held the links but organised nothing.
• Nobody could see whether it worked. There were no usage figures behind it, so the team had no way to tell which material earned its place.
• Then it started ranking on Google. Traffic pushed the page up the results and it became public, exposing material written only for portfolio founders.
• Which made privacy the deciding requirement. The content is written for the Serena Squad and reserved to it, so a page anyone could find defeated its purpose.

Our users highlighted the power of the search engine. It also brings back results that sit inside attachments, and that was one of the criteria we were looking for.

A private library, shaped by function

Serena chose its platform on three requirements: structure the content by function, help members find each other, and search inside the attachments.

• Spaces follow the jobs, not the filing. Content sits under finance, governance, HR, tech, product, sales, marketing and US expansion, the way a founder's problems actually arrive.
• The first space explains the rest. A playbook covers how the Squad works, its charter, what a good answer looks like and who to go to for what.
• One editor holds the line. Heba Hitti writes, publishes, onboards and offboards. Outside contributions are taken rarely, reworked with the author, and credited as a collaboration.
• Search reaches inside the attachments. Years of slides and PDFs were the real archive, so indexing only article text would have left most of the knowledge unfindable.
• Peer answers become content. Threads from the members' mailing lists are moved into a dedicated section, so an answer given once stops being lost in inboxes.

I publish no more than six pieces a month. Our members are already flooded with information, so we would rather post little and post well. Quality over quantity.

Why restraint works here

The Squad is about 300 senior people with full inboxes, so Serena publishes only when it has something worth their time. A playbook can take months, and a month with nothing good in it is a month with nothing published.

Serena reviews usage with its own team every month and shows them what has been read. Turning colleagues into advocates for the library is treated as part of running it.

This library brings real operational know-how to the marketing, technical and product directors across the Serena companies.

Serena could publish far more than it does, and deliberately does not. The library earns its place in 300 busy diaries by being short enough to trust.