Agree. I read the part where they "were limited by having to do manual research" on LinkedIn: essentially typing in the founders' names and hitting return. They did this 52 times. Get some grad students and put them to work. You'll have a couple thousand in no time.
I once emailed Reid Hoffman (a friend knows him) proposing to do an analysis of the life-cycle of an entrepreneur (age, what jobs they held before founding, repeat founder success, etc.) I never heard back from him; I'm sure he's got better things to do. But I wish LinkedIn would set up a data-mining department, like OKCupid's. They could do some really interesting stuff.