Why Ranking Startup Investors Matters For Founders

At Mattermark we’re all about answering questions with data, arming investors, founders, sales, marketing, biz dev, M&A — any dealmaker, with the information they need to intelligently move forward with a transaction.

For founders, ranking investors can help answer extremely important questions:

FUNDRAISING: if you want to ensure you’ll raise your next round, which is the best firm to work with? (first attempt at these rankings is here) if you want to ensure you won’t waste your time, which funds are actively investing right now? (the original “zombie VCs” post that started it all) at which stages and in which sectors? TEAM: if you are expecting a firm to create value-add in recruiting, which firm’s portfolio companies have been most successful at hiring after raising from them? (see our first attempt at these rankings here)

TRACTION: if you are expecting a firm to create value-add in marketing/sales, which firm’s portfolio companies have been most success increasing their momentum after raising? (first attempt here)

MARKET: if you’re working to ensure a range of exit options for your company, which firm’s portfolio companies have been most successful in M&A transactions and/or IPOs?

BOARD CONSTRUCTION: within each firm, which partners have the best returns, follow-on funding rates, recruiting, distribution, etc?

PRODUCT: what firms have produced the most companies with products that have real product/market fit? Which firm’s portfolio companies have survived product pivots the most successfully?

I’ve tackled some of these questions with four unique analyses… but we still have a long way to go to collect all the data needed — especially when it comes to partner attribution and actual fund performance data. As Jonathan Weber of The Information explains in his post last week (paywall), historically the VC industry has been extremely opaque.

There are other questions we could answer but choose not to focus on, like which investors have made the most investments or deployed the most capital. While these are interesting questions from a macro perspective, I don’t believe they actually help founders make the decisions listed above.

How You Can Help

If you are an angel investor, venture capitalist, limited partner or founder who would like to work with us to move data-driven answers to these questions forward we would love to do a data exchange with you. Please feel free to email me directly at danielle (at) mattermark.com

If you are a technical analyst (read: has scripting and database skills), software engineer with a focus and experience in machine learning, deep learning, neural networks, artificial intelligence — or simply love this data and these questions and want to spend all day every day working to answer them you should know Mattermark is hiring! Check out our open jobs.

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