Startups
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CrunchFund Backed LikeIt.com Will Shut Down April 30th
According to a banner across the top of the company’s website, interest-based people discovery service LikeIt will shut down tomorrow. Originally called TheComplete.me, the company relaunched as LikeIt.com in late January of this year. Its Facebook app and shows ~1,000 monthly active users, and the website doesn’t appear to have ever had enough traffic to produce a traffic graph on Alexa.
According to Crunchbase, the company raised $1.22M from Intel Capital, CrunchFund, and Plentyofish 1 year ago and received an additional $500,000 in January from Western Technology Investment.
From my own experience it’s pretty difficult to burn through nearly $2M in a year with such a small team, so it wouldn’t surprise me if the company was changing course to fight another day with a new project. The company is lead by CEO and Cofounder Brian Bowman and I have reached out to him for comment.
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Mis-Management & Incompetence at Ecomom
We benefit from a startup culture where it’s okay to fail, but that doesn’t mean we should avoid examining the mistakes that lead to the loss of capital, jobs, and the opportunity cost when increasingly limited venture capital dollars go to the wrong companies.
It’s time for Silicon Valley to take doing business as seriously as we take writing code.Ecomom controller Philip Prentiss wrote a post-mortem of the company’s financial and managerial situation, chronicling how things fell apart in the months leading up to shutting down. His analysis ultimately points to Ecomom CEO Jody Sherman’s lack of business acumen:
“He was not a numbers guy. I would bring the financial statements to Jody who would glance at them so cursorily and wave me away with “no one can understand this without extensive analysis.” Critically, he did not understand margin. At the end of December when things were getting truly desperate, he said to me “Phil, just bring me a forecast that shows how much we need to sell to break even.” He did not understand, after three years of negative margin, that increased sales resulted in increased losses.” – Prentiss
Accountability Starts with Transparency
It really is remarkable just how easy it is to digitally disassociate yourself from having held an important role at a failed company. The senior management team of Ecomom, who go unnamed in Prentiss’ post mortem, should be held accountable for the company failing as well. It is too convenient to hide behind the tragic ending of Jody’s life, or to simply remove any relationship with the company from your LinkedIn profile as several employees have done.
Ecomom’s VP of Marketing Leslie Langford ran a marketing program with aggressive discounting that played a substantial role in driving the company into the ground.
“You don’t need the company’s financials to get a glimpse of what was going on. If you Google “Ecomom†and “coupon†you find 73,000 results. Many were run through daily deals sites. This one on PlumDistrict is one of the more egregious. It offers $100 of product for just $40, with free shipping, and when you consider the healthy 50 percent that most deal sites take, the economics are even worse. As one investor characterized it to me, it’s like selling a dollar for $0.20 — venture capital dollars at that, which aren’t limitless in today’s era and can come with a steep cost.” — Sarah Lacy, PandoDaily
Ecomom’s VP of Sales, who I believe is the same person as Alex Sayyah – VP of eCommerce, was paid on revenue before discounts – leading to a mis-aligned and expensive compensation package.
“the VP of Sales was compensated according to sales before discounts, not according to margin or profit. Our discount strategy resulted in enormous losses, but for the VP of sales the strategy optimized his bonus” – Prentiss
He appears to have removed all record of himself working at the company from his LinkedIn profile, although his past tweets indicate he worked there at some point and Zoominfo captured his old profile. I have reached out to him to confirm whether he is the VP of Sales who received this misguided compensation package:
Also critical to the team was Ecomom cofounder and “Chief Mom Officer” Emily Blakeny, who now lists herself simply as VP of Merchandising for the past 5 years.
Reality Distortion Field Gone Wrong
Investors don’t get the luxury of hoping the Internet will forget, as Ecomom has one of the most surprising Crunchbase pages I’ve ever seen with ~$10M in total raised from a huge slew of investors, many of them quite high profile angels, in a series of party rounds.
At first I thought it seemed unlikely that Ecomom’s CEO could trick these people into investing in broken company, however popular Los Angeles VC Mark Suster clearly felt Jody’s grasp on the numbers was strong:
“Ok. I have to admit something to you. With your persona I always expected to ask you tough financial questions about your business and expect you to say, “let me check with my CFO.†You didn’t. You always had the most precise mastery of your numbers. The way no CEO from Harvard does.“ – Mark Suster, Goodbye Jody (emphasis added)
This doesn’t add up with the controller’s account of Jody not being “a numbers guy”.
The startup ecosystem can’t afford to turn a blind eye to this blatant example of mis-management and lack of understanding of fundamental business concepts and math. Startups need to stop trying to re-invent good business practices, evidenced by the litany of self-helpish posts rising to the top of Hacker News, and focus on building real businesses that leverage the skills, knowledge and experience of skilled operators.
Investors who say their value-add is operational experience you are on warning – the expectation is that you break through the reality distortion field to help founders see around these corners. For hired senior management this should go without saying but I’ll say it anyway: operating the business in a way that will ensure its survival is your #1 priority. Sexy top line numbers might get you a pat on the head or line the pockets of the sales guy, but strategic long term thinking by professional managements wins every time (even when it fails).
Image credit: Tripletsisters on Flickr
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Thoughts On YC Interview Prep
Companies currently interviewing for Y Combinator have taken the Internet’s advice to reach out to alumni to practice before they present, but unfortunately we don’t scale very well. I’ve prepped with a dozen teams so far and will probably talk to a dozen more before the weekend ends, but that will hardly scratch the surface. I am asking them all the same questions, so I thought I’d sum it up here for people I won’t have time to chat with.
My phone number is 425-698-7497. Call me for a 10 minute prep session. If I don’t answer just try again (or you could build a Twilio app to keep trying me, just sayin’). I won’t promise to return voicemails or texts – imagine I’m one of those people in the 90s with a landline phone and no voicemail machine who says, “if it was important they’ll call back”.
Rule #0: Read the Official Y Combinator “How to Prepare for the Interview” Guide
The Conversation
At the end of the interview, which is quite short, the people you’ve spoken to should know what you’re making (ideally because you actually showed it to them), believe you are the best team to make it, and think you are rational/determined/resourceful enough that if it doesn’t work out you’ll figure ouut what to do next.
“There’s one type of question your practice investors probably won’t ask, and we probably will: whether you’ve considered various mutations of your idea. We spend all our time dealing with startup ideas, so we’ll often see potential variations of yours that might be interesting. Your idea is almost certain to change as you work on your startup, and while it’s not necessarily going to change into something that comes up in the interview (though it has happened), we’re very interested to see how good you are at traversing idea space.” – Official YC Interview Prep Guide
Here are my 5 bullet points for this blog post
- Write down 3 to 5 key points you want to be sure to communicate
- Walk in ready to present the most important information first
- If you have a product, walk in with laptop in hand and show it
- Answer questions quickly using as few words as possible
- Make sure you bring the conversation back to cover your key points
Practice with people who are critical of you, your idea, and the way you present your ideas. When you prep helpers become yes men, giving you a metaphorical pat on the head, it’s time to dismiss them and move on.
The Demo
You should practice your demo as much as you practice answering questions. Practice walking in, open laptop in hand, placing it on the table and immediately showing what you’ve made so far. Do whatever you have to do to make this a smooth process… if you product is half done have all the important pages open in different tabs already. Be logged in. Have plenty of battery life, and make sure you’re connected to YC wifi.
The reason we like demos so much is that they reduce the amount of guessing we have to do. A startup needs to have (a) good ideas (b) implemented energetically. And while it’s fairly easy to tell from talking to someone how smart they are, it’s much harder to tell how good they are at getting things done. On that dimension we’re practically reduced to guessing. So anything you can do to show us how good you are at getting things done will make us much more sure of you. A good demo multiplies the effect of however well you answer our questions.” – Official YC Interview Prep Guide
If you feel like the conversation or questions about the product are going in a different direction than you want take control of the meeting and gently direct the conversation back to what matters, using trigger words like, “What’s really important to understand is…”
If stuff goes wrong in the demo just keep going, exhplain, visualize, use the whiteboard, whatever – but don’t spend (waste) 2 minutes trying to fix something or start over. Imagine it is a piano recital – the audience doesn’t know how the piece is supposed to go so just keep going and they probably won’t even notice that you screwed up, or at least it won’t matter that much.
Beware the Curse of Knowledge
The Curse of Knowledge is a cognitive bias, and the number one thing I worry about for teams I prep with. Are you explaining things which is very detailed way that and requires inside knowledge which the interviewer may or may not have? You might be suffering from this cognitive bias. “But PG and RTM are interviewing me, surely they’ll understand!” you argue. They might. But they’re also going to be left wondering if you’re going to be helpless in communicating with and marketing to mere mortals. This behavior of dumping a deluge of information on the interviewer instead of essentializing and breaking it down into understandable chunks seems to be a natural fallback for coping with stress for many founders.
Buzzword bingo might be another flavor of the curse of knowledge, and tends to be spawned from the business guy mindset. This meeting is not the time to brag about what an awesome growth hacker you are, or drop names (well drop maybe one, and make sure that person is an investor or some other meaningful part of the company), or come off like an MBA douchebag. The only marketing stuff you should talk about in this meeting is how many customers you have, how you got them, what they’re saying, and how you plan to get more.
If you’re already launched, you should know everything you can about your users. Where do new users come from? What is your growth like? (Bring a printout of a graph.) What’s the conversion rate? What makes new users try you? Why do the reluctant ones hold back? What are the top things users want? What has surprised you about user behavior?” – Official YC Interview Prep Guide
Also, listen to Marina and the Diamonds and dance around the house when you need to de-stress:
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Strikingly, BuildZoom and Bitnami Lead Hottest Y Combinator Winter 2013 Startups
Tomorrow marks 1 month since Y Combinator Demo Day for the Winter 2013 class of startups, and since I’ve been tracking their progress for awhile now I have a pretty good sense of who has seen sustained interest, growing traffic, and increased audience through social media. The weeks after Demo Day were a strange time, in some ways anti-climactic as companies leave the YC nest but also exciting as they begin to close in on funding rounds which will be announced in the coming months.On 3/25, 4/7, 4/15 and 4/21 we measured of several data points for each company. For this ranking we use Alexa rank (traffic) scaled to product unique visitors, Twitter followers, Facebook followers, and LinkedIn followers to assess who has been gaining the most visibility to customers and the outside world since Demo Day.
Want to analyze this data yourself? Download the raw dataset here.Of course this is no measure of revenue, but it does give a good sense of which companies have the strongest top of funnel for gaining new leads right now. I wouldn’t be surprised if the companies at the top of this list were the most competitive deals for funding, and the most in-demand for jobs.
It will be interesting to see whether this ranking holds up one year from now.
Full disclosure: I have made an angel investment in Bitnami. -
Weekly Traction Tracker: Who Is Hottest Among 1,100 Startups?
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.
Top 20 Startups – Website Traffic Growth*
*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.
Top 20 Startups – Twitter Following % Growth
*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.
Top 20 Startups – Facebook Likes % Growth
And my personal favorite, because getting LinkedIn followers is pretty difficult:
Top 20 Startups – LinkedIn Follower Count
And last but not least:
Top 20 Startups – % Increase Inbound Links
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.
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Startup Index: First Round Capital – April 2013
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.
Top 10 Consumer Companies
- StumbleUpon
- Wikia
- Fab
- 9GAG
- ModCloth
- ROBLOX
- Uber
- One Kings Lane
- SAY Media
- Refinery29
Top 10 B2B Companies
- Square
- AppNexus
- OpenX
- Get Satisfaction
- Gigya
- VigLink
- Tremor Video
- Flurry
- Urban Airship
- Knewton
How the Startup Index Ranking System Works
This index is built on a weighted points system which considers the following factors: website traffic, social media following, social media engagement, employee count, page rank, inbound links, and SEOmoz domain trust score. Funding information is provided to give the reader context, but is not factored into a company’s ranking position.
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.
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Investor Index: Discover the Most Popular VC & Angel Blogs
Looking for the music? I’m trying something new and have embedded the entire Darwin Deez album! Scroll to the bottom of this post to hit play, because music makes reading spreadsheet a lot more fun.
Update: This post may have been more timely than I realized. I just noticed that David Hornik’s most recent post from early March talked about marking 10 years as a VC blogger. He says it best in his post:
I had no idea ten years ago that VentureBlog would prove a catalyst for a whole industry of bloggers. But I am thrilled that it has. Not only has blogging provided us venture capitalists with the opportunity to demystify an enigmatic industry. But, more importantly, it has given entrepreneurs an invaluable resource to assist them in the incredibly challenging task of company creation. With any luck VentureBlog and the many VC blogs that followed will continue to flourish for years to come.
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Long before I ever imagined starting my company, I began reading a handful of investor blogs to follow along with what was happening in the startup world. When I learned about tech startups in 2006 I found it amazing to me that someone in their 20s could raise millions of dollars to build something the world had never seen before, and I wanted to understand how that worked and who made it possible. The first investor blogs I ever read and subscribed to, in 2006 were Josh Kopelman, Mike Speiser and Paul Graham. The landscape has changed since then, with hundreds of investors now sharing their thoughts on their blogs.
By the Numbers
- 68 investor blogs have been updated since the beginning of 2013
- 17 investor blogs rank above the global Alexa 100,000
- According to Alexa the 5 most widely read investor blogs are Y Combinator, Dharmesh Shah, Paul Graham, Fred Wilson and Mark Suster.
- 2 female VCs are blogging (as of publishing): Christine Herron and Rachel Strate (not updated since 2009).
Who have I missed? Which investors blog posts from the past are so good they should be read over and over again? Let me know in the comments so I can keep this updated.
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Traction Tracker: 84 Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
What’s this music thing? I pair music with my posts, as I find it makes digesting spreadsheets a bit more fun. Enjoy!
I’ve been compiling stats about the Y Combinator, 500 Startups and Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies to produce The Startup Index. Website traffic tells only part of a company’s story, but how it changes over time can reveal who is gaining momentum and attention online. Focusing on Alexa ranking deltas, rather than absolute numbers, also shines a light on enterprise, hardware and developer focused startups who would normally get pushed down low on any traffic-based ranking system.Imagine “Hot Companies” Lists Driven By Data, Not PR
Have you ever wondered how those “Top X of Y” posts are generated? Occasionally journalists will put out a request to PR people for companies that fit with a roundup post they’re working on. The PR firm will send over some logos and blurbs for a few companies that fit, and boom – you have 3-for-1 placement. But what if we used data to compile our own “Hot Startups to Watch” article by the numbers?
- 75% (84 of the 112) YC companies in the Alexa 250,000 grew their traffic since March
- Companies with traffic growth had a median delta of +4,130 positions, average delta of +11,121 positions.
- 35% (29 of the 84) of companies with traffic growth outperformed the average delta.
- 5% (4 of the 84) of companies with traffic growth are also members of the Alexa 500
Scroll below the spreadsheet for a little analysis on the top 10 companies.
Some have suggested it would be more useful to take the log of the March rank and compare it to the log of the April rank, to account for the fact that it is more difficult to go from the 10,000 position to the 1,000 position than from the 100,000 to 10,000 position in the Alexa global rank. I have created that data set as well, and the results are:
What would you do with this data? Let us know in the comments.
Quick Notes on the Top 10
You might wonder why successful companies like Weebly, Scribd, Airbnb, and Disqus are at the bottom of the list. Being listed at all means the company has grown its traffic in the last month, and made it into the prestigious top quarter million websites in the world. Ranking by delta calls attention to companies with the most upward momentum in their website traffic, relative to the other properties on the Internet. Moving from the 122 to 121st more popular website globally, as Dropbox did this month, is a big deal and could indicate an increase of hundreds of thousands of visitors.
Snipshot – I was excited to see a Winter 2006 company in the #1 spot. Some research reveals the site went up for auction on Flippa recently for $10,000 and some commenters mentioned they found the auction because Mark Zuckerbeg liked it (I’m assuming on Facebook). That might account for the traffic spike.
Get Going – Get Going is a YC company from last summer who launched their travel service a few weeks ago to let people get crazy good deals if they’re willing to let the service pick their destination. This traffic is most result of the classic “TechCrunch spike”, and it will interesting to see where things settle in a month.
AeroFS – It’s great to see a B2B company at #3 on the list, and AeroFS is helping large groups collaborate in the cloud of sensitive files. This is a classic big company problem of needing to keep confidential stuff inside the firewall, and exactly the kind of service to adopt if IT refuses to let you use Google Docs. Just last week they announced they’re out of beta on the company blog, and this feels like one of those “boring” companies that just chugs along in relative quiet and then is suddenly HUGE.
Ark – I couldn’t find any recent press or other activity to explain the increase in traffic, but according to Alexa ~50% of their traffic is going to livedash.ark.com, a service that let’s you search for anything said on national TV.Custora – The customer engagement and retention company announced they’ve landed a LivingSocial as a customer earlier this month, and they’ve also been actively updating their company blog with helpful content for customers.
AnyPerk – Announced a $1.4M round of funding from Digital Garage and others to expand their employee perk management services, and experienced a nice TechCrunch traffic bump. The website was also redesigned recently.
Firebase – James Tamplin’s company continues on a tear with the announcement that the app infrastructure service is now available to all developers.
PagerDuty – The company announced a $10.5 Million round from Andreessen Horowitz in January and have grown to 24 employees.
YouGotListings – The landlord management tool (I need this!) appears to be chugging along on minimal people and cash, with no other funding announced other than their Y Combinator / StartFund investment. I couldn’t find any recent news events, so I’d imagine most of the traffic bump comes from more active usage. They also mentioned their were revamping some features in February on the company blog.
Verbling – They launched Google Hangout powered language learning classes back in December and it looks like it’s paying off. They’ve got right now and a thriving multi-lingual following on Twitter.
Methodology Notes
Companies that have exited are not included. W13 companies are excluded from this analysis, and will debut in the April Y Combinator index later this month. I have limited the list to companies in the top 250,000 websites globally according to Alexa.
Many very successful YC companies who would be considered “stable” aren’t going to show up here if their traffic rank stayed the same or dropped a few positions over the past month. That doesn’t mean they’re not doing well, and in fact they’re likely growing as they convert more and more of their returning visitors into paying customers. The goal of this list is to identify the movers and the shakers, the up-and-comers, and the under appreciated growth of the early stage. You can check out the March 2013 Y Combinator Index for a ranked list of the entire portfolio as of March 20, 2013.
There are 94 other companies who also climbed the Alexa ranking in this period, but are not yet in the top 250,000 websites and I look forward to doing more analysis of these companies in a separate post.
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Zombie VC Post – The Bug Report
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)
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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.
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119 Investors Actively Doing Series A Deals Since March 1st
Strategy #1 for Surviving the Series A Crunch: If you must pitch, at least pitch investors who are doing Series A deals right now. It will save you time and heartache.
Despite the doom and gloom predictions about Series A Crunch there were 119 institutional investors (according to Crunchbase) who participated in a Series A round since the beginning of March 2013. I have
ranked them by historical deal involvement size, and as a rule of thumb companies nearer to the top of list list are more likely to lead Series A rounds and companies lower on the list are more likely to participate (there are tons of exceptions)updated the list, based on a great deal of helpful feedback, to show the funds alphabetically. I hope to offer more data on fund size and percent of capital deployed in the future.Hey investors, do you belong on this list? Get busy! Or, if I missed your deal let me know and I’ll update it. My email is morrilldanielle (at) gmail.com – I am actively updating this list regularly.
Active Series A Investors January 1, 2013 to Present