This post is part of a series on data-driven blogging which includes the Startup Index and Investor Index. I have quantified companies from 500 Startups, Y Combinator, TechStars, Andreessen Horowitz and First Round Capital and would love to hear your feedback on what I should measure next.

I hate subjective top X lists as much as the next guy, and since I’m tracking ~1,100 companies now I thought it would be fun to share the fastest growing folks of the past week. These are this week’s movers and shakers.

*calculated as the delta between the log of the original Alexa rank and log of the new rank. Updated to remove TutorialTab, founder has confirmed the company is no longer operational.

*the @Authy Twitter account followersappear to be primarily spam accounts, they went from 239 followers to 7736 followers in the past week – they say they did not buy followers so they might have been bot bombed.

And my personal favorite, because getting LinkedIn followers is pretty difficult:

And last but not least:

Other Notable Movements in the Data

On LinkedIn companies self-report which bucket company size they are in, and usually this doesn’t move much. However, Task Rabbit and Bizible both bumped up from the 2-10 employees to 11-50 employees size.

This post is part of the Startup Index series, which ranks companies and profiles investor portfolios on a monthly basis. I have previously indexed Y Combinator, 500 Startups, TechStars and Andreessen Horowitz. Like data-driven news? Check out the Traction Tracker and the Active Investor Index, and be sure to let me know which portfolio you’d like to see me index next in the comments or by emailing morrilldanielle (at) gmail.

Ask around when you’re raising a seed or Series A round, and First Round Capital is one of the first investors on the lips of many entrepreneurs. I tend to trust my friends when they recommend an investor, so I never did much due diligence on the firm. But when people started suggesting I add them to the Startup Index series I was intrigued. Would their portfolio match up with their reputation?

I’ve done the research, now you decide.

First Round Capital, By the Numbers

• 145 companies (not exited) – 46% B2B, 54% consumer
• current fund is $135M announced in April 2012 (previous fund was $126M announced in October 2010)
• total of $3.2B in funding raised across all companies, all rounds (from all investors, not just FRC)
• 8 companies that have raised more than $100M each (50/50 split consumer and B2B)

Updated to move Square to the B2B list.

Is total funding raised correlated with a higher ranking position?

Funding amount is not used as a criteria for the ranking points system right now, so I thought it would be interesting to see whether the amount a company has raised is correlated with the position it holds in the ranked list. The Pearson number for consumer companies is -0.64 and for B2B companies is -0.65, indicating a moderate negative correlation in both cases (the lower the rank number, the higher the funding amount).

Consumer Companies Index

B2B Companies Index

Data Sources: First Round Capital website, Crunchbase, SEC EDGAR database, and AngelList.

Also, LOL.

What’s this? I usually pick a song I feel goes with the post and expresses my mood writing it. Enjoy, I hope it will enhance your reading experience.

I’d like to address some bugs from Yesterday’s Zombie VCs post, which provided a list of investors who were inactive in Series A deals in the past 6 months according to Crunchbase, a self-reported database of deals updated by startups and their investors as follow-up to a post about helping founders find active investors during the Series A crunch and avoiding taking meetings that are a waste of time.

I would like to express my appreciation to O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, MMC Ventures, Lightbank, Kepha Partners, Paladin Capital Group, Mercury Fund, Neu Venture Capital, Shasta Ventures, Genesis Partners, Magma Venture Partners, Kima Ventures, Greylock Ventures Israel, Softbank Capital, Carmel Ventures and Emergence Capital for reaching out to provide data and help me confirm they are currently actively doing Series A deals in recent months. Big thank you also goes to Shira Abel, who has been reaching out to Israeli VCs to get them updated and on the active list.

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.

The Data Is Crap

I used data from Crunchbase, which is much less accurate than I thought it would be. I did expect some errors, but mistakenly thought the 6 month window was big enough to limit that and didn’t take the time to validate the list or contact the companies on it. I also limited the list to funds who participated in Series A deals in the past, but it turns out many of those were one-off deals from growth capital firms or follow-on from funds who primarily focus on seed. I should have taken more time to research this data, cross check with other sources, and at the very least reach out to some very obviously active firms like Shasta to find out more info before publishing.

I am still a huge advocate for Crunchbase, which I think is a treasure in the startup community, and encourage investors to update their profiles. I have also submitted a feature request to them to allow investors to update activity without revealing the companies, so we’ll see how that goes. Founders aren’t reading paid subscription data services or VC insider newsletters and I don’t think it is realistic to expect them to start.

The Methodology Needs Work

While I believe this first attempt raised some transparency around investor activity, a mea culpa is definitely necessary where methodology is concerned and I wholeheartedly agree with Fred Destin’s suggestions in ZOMBIE VCS TAKE II – HOW TO SPOT AN ACTIVE FIRM which jives well with in-depth methodology feedback I’ve received privately as well. I have included a list of corrections in the original post, and also updated active investors list for March 2013 as needed. Going forward I look forward to offering an updated active investors list, and I will be leveraging additional data sources that have been offered (thank you) and contacting companies.

Listing Inactive Investors is of Little Value to Founders

Creating a list of inactive investors isn’t very constructive, and is of little practical value of founders. What founders want to know is which investors are active, they care much less about who is inactive. I have been working through many ideas around the best ways to track fund performance which are still specific and transparent but are also credible and helpful, and I welcome your input in the comments, via email and on Twitter to help me improve this.

There were several smaller bugs as well, including:

• The title also turned out to be much more sensational than I would have expected, playing off of my previous “Zombie Startups” post
• The disclaimers about data quality were not clear enough to many readers
• The use of the “total deal participation size” number to sort the list was useless (and has since been removed, it is now alphabetical)

—

As a blogger I believe in offering insight based on experience, a data-driven perspective wherever possible, and actionable details that are useful for founders (like a list of investors who are actively doing deals) whenever possible.

I would also like to acknowledge, though I cannot name, dozens of people who have sent me tips and other info I am following up on, hopped on calls with me to explain their perspective and ideas for how to make this better and more useful for entrepreneurs and the ecosystem as a whole, opened up APIs and other data sources for additional research, and expressed their appreciation and shared personal stories. They bring a huge range of experience across the entire startup community including founders, associates, VCs with names you’d recognize, long admired heroes of venture and tech, quiet “guy behind the guy” types and everything else in between. I’m listening and working to bring their feedback into the content I create in the future. I know I will not win over people who don’t want this information made public, and quite honestly I just don’t care. This one’s for all the founders in the struggle.

Thanks to Fred Wilson for the inspiration on how to craft this post.

Today is Y Combinator Demo Day, and I’ve compiled a list of Y Combinator startups from the current batch who have officially launched (27 of 47) and ranked them using the same methodology as this month’s YC Index. It is extremely early days for these companies, this can give you a sense of who is getting attention and seeing early growth and we will use this as a benchmark for them in the index going forward. I will update this post as new companies are launched throughout the day.

The companies highlighted in orange would have made it into the top 100 of the Y Combinator Index released for March. All companies will be included in the April index.

Link to spreadsheet

I post this with the caveat that web traffic rarely tells the full story for any company. We have done our best to also factor in Facebook monthly active users and mobile app rankings, but for enterprise and developer tools companies the amount of website traffic they receive can be disproportionately low compared to how much money they make.

Update: Now includes PayTango, which launched last night.

Data sources include TechCrunch, Crunchbase, AngelList and YClist.

Last week I published the first Y Combinator Startup Index, which ranks the companies who have gone through the YC program using traffic data, Facebook monthly active users, and mobile data where it’s available to determine how well each company is doing.

Update – 500 Startups head honcho Dave McClure left some helpful insights on the Hacker News comment thread related to this post.

As with the other index, there are caveats. Web traffic only tells part of the story for any company, and this index doesn’t contain complete information about Facebook app usage or mobile app usage. What’s most useful is seeing how these rankings change over time, so I will be updating this monthly.

You can also view the full spreadsheet here.