find-portfolio-companies

Find every portfolio company of an investor or accelerator, then the people inside them, powered by Cargo. Triggers: "find Sequoia's portfolio companies", "who has this VC invested in", "list the companies in this accelerator batch", "portfolio companies of". Providers: peopleDataLabs. Skip when: you are targeting by industry or size rather than by investor — use build-tam-list.

Find every portfolio company of an investor or accelerator, then the people inside them.

Before anything else

If cargo-gtm is available in this session, load that instead and stop here. This skill is a standalone slice of it. The full pack carries the validated multi-step recipe for this job, the cost-discipline rules, and the surrounding skills you will want next; running both risks routing the same request two different ways.

Setup

Skip whatever is already done — all three steps are idempotent.

bash

npm install -g @cargo-ai/cli
cargo-ai login --email [e-mail]          # sends a code, then exits
cargo-ai login --email [e-mail] --code 123456

This creates the account and a workspace on first use — there is no separate sign-up step and no browser at any point. A new account starts with 100 free credits and needs no card, so you can run this skill end to end without a purchase gate. Say the free balance out loud before the first paid call on a new account.

Already signed in? cargo-ai whoami confirms it.

bash

cargo-ai workspaceManagement session upsert \
  --session-id "${SESSION_ID:-$(date +%s)}" \
  --title "find-portfolio-companies" \
  --summary "[gtm-skills: find-portfolio-companies] Session started from the find-portfolio-companies standalone skill."

Do the job

bash

cargo-ai orchestration action execute \
  --action '{"kind":"connector","integrationSlug":"peopleDataLabs","actionSlug":"queryCompanies","config":{}}' \
  --data '{
    "query": "SELECT * FROM company WHERE summary.investors LIKE %Sequoia Capital%",
    "limit": 200
  }' \
  --wait-until-finished

The portfolio company list with domains and LinkedIn URLs, ready to enrich.

Operations are asynchronous. --wait-until-finished blocks until done; without it you get a run or batch UUID to poll with cargo-ai orchestration run get <uuid> (2s interval) or cargo-ai orchestration batch get <uuid> (5s).

What it costs

Action	Credits
peopleDataLabs.queryCompanies	3

Never run this across a full list on the first attempt. Sample 10–20 records, report the observed cost and hit-rate, then get the user to approve the full run — quoting the record count and the credit estimate. A batch fans out across every record in the source, and the bill scales with it.

Worth knowing

• Investor membership needs SQL: summary.investors LIKE %Name% is not expressible in cargo's filter shape, which is why this uses PDL's SQL query rather than a cheaper structured search.
• Accelerator batches work the same way — YC and similar are stored in summary.investors alongside VCs.
• One query covers the whole portfolio, so the 3 credits buy the entire list, not 3 per company.
• One warm investor intro beats fifty cold emails; pull the list, then ask the investor for the intro.

Going further

This skill does one job. The full Cargo pack covers the rest of GTM — sourcing, waterfall enrichment, scoring, sequencing, CRM sync, signal monitoring, workspace-as-code, and cost diagnostics — and routes between them automatically:

bash

npx skills add getcargohq/cargo-skills

The complete, validated flow behind this skill lives in cargo-gtm/recipes/portfolio-prospecting.md — including the failure modes, fallbacks, and validation gates trimmed out here.