> When I make these posts suddenly people start returning my emails requesting data.
Even as a causal observer of the VC market, I was able to spot a lot of false positives in that list.
Call it "Minimum Viable Truthiness", if you'd like.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5491293
Where I'm guessing that refer.ly is trying to raise their own series a and possibly getting frustrated.
That said - entrepreneurs should be more concerned with growing a business than making friends with VCs, so more power to danielle if this is how she ends up making it work.
Refer.ly recently pivoted - in fact every stat about our business is on the front page of our site. We aren't raising Series A, we have ~18 months of runway left at our current burn.
Because of lists like this VCs might in near future keep their traction very public on angellist and crunchbase, allowing founders to make better decisions.
You're implying that information which may not be used wisely by the reader is unprofessional to publish.
Furthermore if those firms are healthy they have nothing to fear.
While the data may not be 100% accurate, I think the author makes a lot of great points about finding out what series A deals a particular investor has done to know whether this is a good fit.
The post is manipulative because it defines zombie VC's as above. However, the data used to arrive at the list does not hold up to the above definition.
There's nothing unprofessional about publishing interesting data. The framing around it is what makes it manipulative. I can see how putting such a list along with the preceding blog post could feel... wrong.
> Even as a causal observer of the VC market, I was able to spot a lot of false positives in that list.
A great point. If you're going to publish data make sure it's correct first.