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Know Your VC — Vetted investor reviews from the founders who know them
Know Your VC is a platform for founders to anonymously or publicly share their experiences with VCs & Angels - both good and bad.
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David Carpe
doesn't thefunded.com already do this at scale? they've been around for years gathering reviews of investors. what's the difference in your approach?
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@passingnotes From what I've seen, there hasn't been a lot of activity on thefunded.com for many years, and even there the data is sparse/stale.
@passingnotes great question. You're correct in that they have been around for a while, but our reviews are much more relevant and we have a 5x larger investor database. Also when founders are reporting harassment/discrimination on our platform, they can choose to privately record their experience and not anonymously publish it until others have come forward privately with similar experiences.
Love this @anthonyjz17 it seems more akin to a G2Crowd/Capterra/Siftery for VC's. The flywheel opportunity is getting the VC's to actively promote their scores/profiles. Email signatures, twitter profiles, medium signatures. Maybe appeal to the vanity element with top ten lists or similar based on category, push press to those lists, VC's put in the work to invite their startups to review. Flywheel started. Excited to hopefully track lots of progress!
@jcwinter I think that's definitely a great idea, we definitely have plans to engage VCs with some of the ideas that you have mentioned. Thank you for the inspiration 😊
Yelp for VCs. Something like this, but specifically for women, behind an identity verification wall could probably take off.
@iansmith That's a feature, yes, not the value prop. But a secure/verified environment to compare notes across different self-identifying subgroups seems like a core requirement for something like this to gain traction. Then you can share artifacts/decks, how meetings/pitches wen, who was an idiot/an amazing resource, and who pulled a McClure/Sacca.
Cool concept.
I'm always been skeptical of reviews about "people". My question is -- how do you combat the reality that real juicy details about any individual are only shared privately? Most people (not everyone) are very, very weary of the future potential repercussions of leaving a negative review about someone publicly. What if a founder leaves a negative review, another VC sees it, and doesn't participate in their round 18 months later as a result?
In short, how do you ensure the platform shows the real picture rather than just a bunch of 5 star & 1 star reviews?
@iamcrumplecat that would definitely be really useful, thank you for your feedback!
Hi 👋🏽 Product Hunt community!
I'm Anthony, one of the team members at Know Your VC. My team and I started this project to provide a widely-accessible and safe place for founders to anonymously or publicly share their experiences with VCs & Angels - both good and bad.
We believe Know Your VC will truly benefit founders by increasing transparency in the venture world. The platform is still in its early stages so any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
My teammates and I will be available all day to answer your questions! 🤗
@anthonyjz17 hey! great job there, I will start filling in some info for a few contacts :)
Btw would you be interested in sharing the info in bulk? send me an email chriszioutas@datacircle.io
This is really high value. Congratulations @anthonyjz17!
I am really glad that there is a question about whether or not the investor ever behaved inappropriately. I do not know any women working in tech that have not dealt with inappropriate behavior or overt sexism at some point in the career. I love that founders can privately report issues! Where does your interest in supporting female founders come from and how do you see this evolving?
@rachaelbn thanks Rachael I'm happy that you like those features! We put a lot of thought in developing this platform to be a place where all founders can feel safe in reporting their experiences. I'm interested in supporting female founders because I believe it's the right thing to do and I want to do my part in helping solve the massive issues of harassment/discrimination in tech.
@anthonyjz17 I am so glad to hear that. Issues like this only change if everyone recognizes their existence and works to make a difference. Glad to see this happening. Beyond the ubiquitous discrimination female founders face, are there other specific issues you are hoping to tackle?
@rachaelbn another big issue I aim to tackle is the lack of investor knowledge for first-time founders. Being a young founder, I didn't truly know where to start fundraising other than trying to get meetings with big-name VCs. I now know that some of my less well-known investors turned out to provide the greatest value add to my company. The platform will help even the playing field for both big and small name VCs.
Ok, we've just launched a product on PH, now it's time to run through the list of investors :)
If you manage to maintain a high-quality data, it should be a very useful service.
Anonymity is going to be a problem. Investors only work w/ a finite amount of entrepreneurs at any given time. How will you take on that challenge?
Great work folks! This insight will be incredibly useful to many people. Thanks for the effort & best wishes!
We should have a feature in Product Hunt which tells us when sites are shut down / don't work anymore!
I guess you've been asked this many times, but other than a clean UI, how is this different from The Funded? How can users be sure that you're not going to sell information about reviewers to VCs?
Great product. Would be great if you could verify whether it was a funded company anonymously. These should carry extra weight in your algorithm.
I liked it! very helpful for entrepreneurs. A search/list by location feature would be great. Thanks and good luck guys!
This is fantastic. Just found this after a terrible interaction with a VC and found out I was not the only one. I will now be researching all VCs I don't know prior to chatting with them here.
Pros:Easy to use, detailed reviews, let's me know what I'm in for.
Cons:None.
Congratulations Anthony! I love that you're bringing transparency to a process that desperately needs it!
Really good platform for entrepreneur, so they won't waste their time with wrong vc.
@laduramvishnoi Glad you're enjoying the platform! Thank you for the support!
Love it! I've been waiting for something like this. Really useful for founders!