dmor

We have taken nowhere near as much dilution as you are suggesting.

I want to clarify this, because I don't want anyone else to think they should take 60% dilution before they take their real first equity round. Without revealing our entire cap table and terms (I'm transparent as I can be, but I think this would upset some of my investors) I can tell you the rule of thumb is to give up no more than 25% dilution on convertible notes before an equity round.

Generally you will sell 20% of the company in the Series A (read as: first equity round), 15% in the 2nd (Series B), another 15% in the 3rd (Series C). Our dilution position from these early rounds is still slightly TBD depending on the valuation we get in our next round, but we are sticking pretty close to this rule. Additionally, we maybe we able to hit the milestones required to sell less than 20%... so that optionality is there.

This is a really important insight as you read this study. We are starting to collect unrealized and realized IRR data from funds, and I hope we will be able to provide a more performance-based index ranking soon.

Mattermark founder here, and to be clear we are not "prognosticating" - the Mattermark Score has not been proven to be predictive in any way. It is descriptive, describing which companies are getting more and more people to care about their existence on an ongoing basis. If anything, this might be similar to "traction" and might help companies raise... but as we all know many startups who appear to have traction still fail. What we hope to do is make investors aware of companies who are gaining traction that they might overlook, and in the long run we hope we can encourage them to look beyond the echo chamber of tech and focus on the echo chamber of a startup's actual customers. We'll see how it goes...

Exactly. We have 1 year of data, and are certainly backtesting. So far the only thing we can really test is whether momentum helps with fundraising... more on that soon

We don't score companies until we have 4 weeks of data, so for some that we haven't been tracking for long we just don't have enough info yet - sorry!

This is built specifically for mobile usage by people who are at Demo Day. For a desktop friendly style I'd suggest logging in to Mattermark and viewing the batch here: http://mattermark.com/app/data?investors=YC_W14

She was running an agency before, it's possible she just just hired people to do work for her but they weren't a permanent part of the team.

This is a really good point, I just copy/pasted the format for some old slides. I'll update it, definitely not the intent

FundersClub makes investments in companies alongside their customers, which is why they have a portfolio. AngelList does not (to our knowledge) do this, which is why they are not included.

Probably looking for companies to buy.

That is a really interesting criteria, we have a long list of things we'd like to measure. If you have other thoughts on what we should track I'd love to hear them.

According to their Twitter feed they have halted all outbound messages. If you go reset your password on Buffer realize the site might be compromised and use something unique from all your other passwords.

Taxi/limo service is $6B market as is, why does it have to be about self-driving cars to "make sense"? You statement seems to beg the question.

So much auto tune.

We're very aware of these issues and our algorithm accounts for them.

You're welcome to sign up for free trial to poke around and see why each company's score it what it is. We provide graphs and details on all the data points for each company. http://www.mattermark.com/app/signup

At the end of the day investors still need to meet with founders and do their diligence, but I believe we may be able to bring attention to good companies that are not spammy or dishonest but also don't get a lot of press, attention, etc.

Within Mattermark Pro investors can filter by stage, vertical, business model, geography and many other factors to create useful comparisons between companies... Mattermark scores for B2B companies are quite meaningful when comparing apples to apples. I know it is painful to judge and be judged in this ecosystem, but I hope people will see that we are blogging about interesting stuff that others aren't covering and bringing more transparency and information symmetry than before.

We collect 6 key data points on each startup every single day for the score, and track over a dozen more that we may factor into it in the future. This is just the beginning.

Those things are easy to purchase in the short term, but it quickly becomes very expensive to purchase 10% week-over-week increase of Twitter followers, Facebook likes, web traffic, etc (I know, I've tried this before). The Mattermark Score reflects long term growth trends, short term spikes aren't enough to move the needle.

It's just ranking the growth rates of the signals I listed in the post - not saying which company is "best". Frankly, I think a lot of these rankings differ greatly from what I think the overall potential of a company is (I saw them present yesterday at Alumni Demo Day), but potential is not what we're measuring here. Growth is certainly another data point for investors to consider, and historically has been a part of massive information asymmetry - VCs are already looking up all these metrics about companies (manually) as they research, source and diligence. We're just making that more efficient and transparent.

At the end of the day investors do have to choose one company over another, as very few can justify investing in all of them. We're trying to give them more info to go off beyond hype. All of these companies tackle large markets with varied margins, and I believe investors are smart enough to sort that out for themselves and make decisions based on their domain knowledge, relationships, and expertise.

Yes, graphs and a detailed breakdown of Mattermark score inputs and trends week over week are available for logged in users.

Nope, we're building Mattermark. http://mattermark.com/

I hear you, and it might be worth noting this analysis is looking for big changes in a positive direction (it's geared toward investors looking for early upside), and Imgur increased downloads by 200% last week. Time will tell where they're headed. They have a huge web presence.

The #1 startup for mobile, in the overall sense, is Rdio. But we're trying to catch stuff in the way up, so we weigh more heavily toward change in momentum. There is probably another good list I can release later this week that has more of the "usual suspects" you'd expect to see.

Like mamma always said, "well you're certainly not going to get it if you don't ask for it".

I'm actually not sure it is predictive yet, but I am not sure how much that matters. It is more useful for validating reality as it currently is today - startups are anything but reliable when it comes to generating consistent growth. I would imagine the later the stage, the closer to predictive this becomes but I wouldn't make any future claims on outcomes based on this. I think you could probably use it to determine the next round of funding though, so it is useful in the short term.

From the Square website: "Pay just 2.75% per swipe for all major credit cards or a flat monthly $275. No other fees—so you know exactly what you pay."

Do investors know you have 30 days? Company is most valuable with team intact, and hopefully no negative PR. Don't let your company get publicly connected to your post, it could kill a deal. I'm referring to acqui-hire scenario

What if you just kept everyone, told them the truth that you can't pay them, and kept going? If you still believe in the core underlying thing that was working when you started then maybe you can turn this around.

$30 million in sales to bankruptcy in 6 months? That's crazy, I didn't realize that was even possible.

Bingo.

Awesome campaign with YC W13 company Prizeo