Founder's Choice: VC Ratings Done Right

founderschoicevc.com

3 pointsjerry1ye103 comments

Choosing the right partners to sit on your cap table is one of the hardest decisions that a founder has to make. The wrong choice is difficult to undo. Without knowing the right people, it can be difficult to get reliable information on which firms to choose. That’s why we’ve created Founder’s Choice: a website that collects verified investor preferences from founders to rank VC firms.

We hope that by collecting, securing, processing, and publishing founder preferences for their investors, we can democratize access to this information, allowing founders to find out which VCs founders prefer more often than not. We verify that all founders are only able to contribute to the rankings of investors that have actually invested in their startup. If you are a founder who’s raised money from VCs, we would love for you to confidentially give us input on your investors! If not, we hope our rankings can be helpful to you.

How do you make the ratings disconnected to the founders who posted them to protect their privacy?

Hey! We take founder anonymity/protection very seriously - def one of our priorities on this project. Internally we model feedback outcomes using ELO, so we destroy specific outcomes after they are tallied into a firm's score. Additionally, we index founder identities by salting and hashing their Linkedin id, (which is provided by Linkedin and is unique to each developer application key), and we do not store the unaltered id anywhere in our database after we verify a founder's identity. If you knew our env vars, broke Linkedin oauth, and phished the founder you're interested in learning about, you'd be able to find their database record, but that would only tell you whether they've submitted feedback or not, and nothing beyond that.

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