Comment by obviouslygreen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by obviouslygreen | Hacker News Reader

This index can be improved, but I will not stop publishing it monthly and even with flaws it helps entrepreneurs focus their efforts on the most active firms.

Translation: While I understand that this data is seriously flawed, and continues to be so, I will continue to ignore the fact that what I am attempting to achieve is impossible with flawed data (or any historical data taken out of context), and will continue to graciously offer my "help" to small business owners who do not understand that what I'm presenting them with is misleading at best and harmful at worst.

I've been neutral at best on this blog for as long as its posts have been showing up on HN, and while I'm sure it will continue to occasionally make interesting points, this is sensationalism at best and libel at worst. Posting this kind of data collation and labeling it very clearly as a list of firms to be ignored does a disservice to both entrepreneurs looking for sponsors and VC's looking to sponsor them, but not necessarily looking to sponsor every initiative that comes along, all the time.

It would not be unreasonable to conclude that this short-sighted effort actually punishes both entrepreneurs and careful investors. Look at how many massive successes come out of Silicon Valley. Is there at least one consistently every six months? That is, one that's such a big hit that the entire world hears about it? This attitude of "I know what the patterns are and anyone that doesn't follow them is somehow toxic" ignores the fact that those who succeed on large scales are not the ones that follow norms!

This is extremely frustrating to me, partially because the author persists in spreading this foolishness, partially because she doesn't understand why it's foolish, and finally because so many people fail to see that it is foolish. And destructive.

Absolutely. If you base your actions on bad data, you'll get bad results - and that original list was painfully bad. I don't know Silicon Valley particularly well, I but I know that list told you to ignore some of the best, most helpful, and most active firms in the New York City area - including people I've raised from, had on my board, and would repeat the experience with in a second.

Entrepreneurs who just go by this instead of doing their own research (which really doesn't take that long) are doing themselves a massive disservice. Which is ironic, because this whole promotion was wrapped in a big bundle of 'rah rah, I'm helping entrepreneurs'. Not at all so.

What sources would you suggest they use to do their research? This data was from Crunchbase which is the first place most entrepreneurs tell me they look, so I wonder if these New York firms are less motivated to update it. Is there some other place where they're announcing their deals and signaling to the community that they are active? I am researching this and would love to know what sites I should regularly crawl.

New York 500 Startups dude Shai Goldman has a good list going here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArI2sAC4lTszdGN...

Why are you looking for "active" VC's? Why is that a metric? It seems to me that if I were looking for a VC I'd be on the lookout for those who make fewer, more conscious investments, instead of the standard fund that just shotguns their money and plays the numbers.

Side Note: A little game theory... it's probably not a good idea to use a data source (crunchbase) that is heavily influenced by those who you are currently negotiating with. Sounds a little like back in 2007 when Goldman and Co were the ones rating the same junk securities they were trying to offload.

Exactly. Clearly this message is somehow still being missed or ignored: The one metric this list attempts to address just is not as relevant as suggested.

What source should they use for their research? The phone. Everybody in the investor community knows who's investing and who's not. You just pick up the phone and call someone you're on good terms with, or you make sure to ask 'who else should I be talking to?' at the end of a meeting. If you want info on a specific firm, you say 'Is X a good fit? Are they investing right now?' I've rarely gotten anything but a completely forthright answer.

If you're looking to use some independent data source that doesn't involve talking to people (which is the wrong way to go about it because fundraising is inherently a social networking exercise), I'm not sure all the data is universally public. The best source for brand new financings (although not follow-on rounds) is probably the Twitter bot VCDelta (twitter.com/vcdelta), since VCs tend to be good at updating their portfolio pages. Perhaps you could also get institutional fundraising information from the Form Ds (formds.com).

I suspect the Crunchbase data will only get worse as the importance of TechCrunch continues to shrink.

I used to maintain the investor database at an investment bank and I can say, without any doubt, that the Crunchbase data is really, truly terrible. There is simply no one in place with the right incentives to make sure that the data is updated/cleaned with any regularity. Dow Jones VentureSource and Thomson ONE have databases that track venture capital rounds fairly accurately, although obviously there are a ton of deals that are never exposed to the outside world, and there are rarely regulatory requirements that such things be disclosed.

Even when you have the data though, it's hard to tell which investors are actually still doing deals. There are a lot of small funds out there that may not do a deal every 6 months even when they are still actively looking, perhaps because they are in the tail end of their investment period and are trying to be very selective, or perhaps because their typical bite size is large relative to the capital they have to deploy. There are also investors who will tell you that they are continuing to look at deals even when they aren't in a position to invest because they don't have committed capital and it doesn't look good to be out of the market. So all around it's a pretty fuzzy condition that you are looking to describe.

Of course, having a list is still nicer than not having a list, because if you simply "tap your network" for active funds, people will just think about who they've interacted with recently, rather than actually having any knowledge about the specific proclivities of the country's hundreds of venture capital firms, organized angels, etc. It's easy to overlook reasonable candidates.

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