Founder’s Choice
founderschoicevc.com
founderschoicevc.com
a) the partner you meet
b) how badly they want you
c) macro/fund context
d) what’s your fit to them or the competitive environment around your company
And it’s not always apparent what’s good and what’s bad, long term speaking. We’re deep into an A round meeting many funds and I can’t say any single one stands out. Sure some have better chemistry with us, but they are all playing the same book. (other than one who has been especially shit and crafty).
e) how you're introduced
Who intros you and how they're connected to the fund matters a ton.
As an aside, I think it's true that they're all playing the same book -- with the exception of the very top. The playbook that the "deal guys" are playing and the long-term lead-the-industry game that the leaders are playing are different. The former will always say they're the latter but you will notice differences in the social network topology (as well as how they carry themselves and what their outcomes look like) which will clue you in.
People are so naive about how hard it is to really anonymize data and how surprisingly easy it could be to deanonymize it that I'd never trust it without:
1) Some serious explanations and scrutiny about exactly how their deanonimization process work
2) How data leaks are removed from logs and elsewhere
3) how data is aggregated and presented and what measures are taken to prevent deanonimization
Edit: their FAQ is not nearly close to a "serious" discussion. And looking at their code is not an efficient way of learning whether it's a trustworthy approach.
--------- Updated ------------ I misunderstood the "review" part, but still. How hard is it to secure the name of the reviewer. I still don't think they need to be truly anonymized.
Founders don't wanna have a bad reputation in the small VC world. A bad review for a VC might piss them off. Pissing one VC off might be a recipe for earning bad rep.
Numerous datasets have been deanonimized from aggregated stats, just by using correlations and other simple techniques...
For example, a set of fraternal VCs could encourage their fraternal entrepreneurs to skew the rankings in their favour and against the smaller seed fund rounds.
I get adding the verification steps to make sure the data is "real" but if founders want to leave any feedback online about investors they've worked with (already unlikely), they're more likely to leave it on a forum like vcguide.