Dataset of VCs investing in seed and Series A+ rounds
unicorn-nest.com
unicorn-nest.com
> You could violate the ToS by looking at the data and drawing conclusions!
What does that say about VCs...
df['Some of TOP industries'].value_counts()[:10]
Health Care, Biotechnology 129
Medical, Health Care 104
Biotechnology, Health Care 99
Software, Information Technology 90
Health Care, Medical 89
Pharmaceutical, Biotechnology 85
Medical, Biotechnology 81
Medical Device, Health Care 74
Health Care, Medical Device 74
Therapeutics, Biotechnology 73
Or was PR the point?
If this popped up after the Disney tweet made it to the top of Hacker News and went viral on Twitter, then I suspect this was entirely intentional.
I'm not really involved much in VC so I don't know how useful and reliable that information is or how hard would be to come by otherwise?
Edit: and judging by the sites robots.txt you could just scrape the information your self and avoid any ToS problems.
Well that's a bummer
> MUST NOT This phrase, or the phrase "SHALL NOT", mean that the definition is an absolute prohibition of the specification.
It also provides me with little confidence that the data itself is particularly useful, since the terms basically prevent anyone from publicly doing any kind of cross-validation. Scientific peer review didn't appear as some sort of bureaucratic oversight, it appeared because people value information that other experts have reviewed and said "Yeah, that checks out." By even trying to prevent people from doing that, I think the value of this data set is drastically reduced.
They purport to assert some undefined kind of intellectual property rights over the data using a clickwrap contract. I modified the DOM to say "Disagree" before clicking. In the US, I'd think Feist would protect you from any copyright claims on the data, although I haven't looked at it in detail, so it might be creative.
What if this data was clustered not just by top industries invested in, but by thesis and ethos?
1. Is for information use only
2. Shall not be used for any scientific or academic research, in commerce, for analytical purposes, for or any mailout or information distribution purposes, as well as for any illegal purpose
3. Is the property of Unicorn Nest, all rights reserved.
https://backend.unicorn-nest.com/investor/csv
No terms are required to be agreed to if downloading directly.
> No terms are required to be agreed to if downloading directly.
That’s not how terms work... Downloading something from a deep link doesn’t mean it’s automatically WTFPL. (Unless you’re an owner and you say so, of course.)
Those terms were only presented and asked if you agree if you went through the landing page. This provides a direct link. Follow local laws.
But the data are facts and can be used. The presentation falls under copyright. Not sure where this leaves you or us legally. In the end it's a public link, containing public data with the organization of the document being copyrightable. The author has another link somewhere else with terms excluding activities.
Definitely in the gray area. Punished unlikely. In the clear if someone has an ax to grind unlikely.
Probably best to just ignore in the end.