

Startup Index: First Round Capital - dmor
http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/04/startup-index-first-round-capital/

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wikiburner
Serious question not intended to be snarky at all, but shouldn't you be busy
pivoting?

I've always been in awe of founders who can manage to find the time to write
articles, blog posts, do speaking engagements, and be "thought leaders", and
somehow still find the time to rapidly grow a company. To me, it seems like an
either/or proposition, especially when you hear someone like PG describe what
an all-consuming effort starting Viaweb was.

I guess I'm just genuinely curious what your thinking is on the value of all
this blogging in the midst of a pivot, which must be an extremely busy and
stressful time. It seems like every other day you've got another post at the
top of HN. Does it help generate buzz for and drive visitors to Referly, or is
blogging just your version of unwinding after a hectic day?

Obviously your situation is a bit unique in that your startup (or at least the
first incarnation of it) was user-generated content based, so maybe it makes
sense in your case.

Anyway, please don't take this the wrong way, I'm just genuinely interested in
your thinking on this. Best of luck with Referly.

~~~
jkuria
On a similar note, it is hard to imagine folks who spend time on a video like
this one being that good at their core business!

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okueA9dFcnc>

~~~
FelixP
Brett, who leads First Round's platform team, was a film major at NYU... plus
I have to imagine that they could outsource most of the heavy lifting to
contractors to do the editing, mixing, etc.

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hammerzeit
I'm a big fan of first round in general, and this is a cool idea and great
data. But this index seems to be extremely sketchy, especially for B2B
companies. The article says:

"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."

First of all, many of these factors would seem to be correlated and self-
reinforcing (is the ranking data published somewhere?) Also, the vast majority
of these factors ultimately come back to publicity -- which is not necessarily
remotely correlated with success outcomes. Companies like Invite Media, which
certainly qualify as a substantial success, would rank low on this index.

Ultimately, this index seems to reflect less about which startups are actually
sound businesses per se and more about which ones are generating excitement
and hype. Ultimately I'd be more excited to see an index doing the former not
the latter. Are the data sources for this linked to and/or explained anywhere
in greater depth?

~~~
dmor
Couple things:

1\. I could post the raw data, I've held back doing so because it is quite
expensive to collect and organize and I'm hesitant to give it away for free.

2\. I agree that this data may skew toward companies with a great deal of
hype, there is more data I look forward to collecting down the road to produce
a more complete picture. Employee count is quite meaningful for B2B companies,
and because B2B companies are not ranked against B2C companies their
respective Twitter followers do have some meaning. If you build a "boring" B2B
business and it is doing well on social media, you probably have a pretty
strong brand.

~~~
codewright
>because it is quite expensive to collect and organize

Right so why aren't you working on pivoting Referly instead?

I do enjoy hearing from members of the community but I'm reaching the point
where I feel like you need to have a blogging intervention or something.

Do you need one?

~~~
orangethirty
Are you a refer.ly investor?

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bravura
Some comments on data analysis:

"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."

The weightings should be published, the establish trust in the measure.

These features are useful for evaluating B2C companies, but not B2B as much. A
company can be silently killing it in B2B but not have good traffic / social
scores.

For this graph:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/oimg?key=0ApqWF3CqjgjSdE...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/oimg?key=0ApqWF3CqjgjSdEwzbkdSVzdCTGljMGUtLU4tVnpzY2c&oid=2&zx=hcdkx3bwckur)

Don't make the y-axis "Natural log of total funding". 12.5 or 15? What does
that mean? Instead, show the total funding in $MM, and put the y-axis on a
log-scale.

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trg2
My feedback is similar to what others have said - this is a great idea, but
the ranking system seems a bit skewed towards sites that are fundamentally
sound in SEO over anything else.

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alexatkeplar
As far as I can understand:

    
    
      1. Your first passion was referly v1, which didn't work (as I and many others predicted at launch 188 days ago)
      2. referly v2 is pivoting into a "community-contributed magazine of free and paid content"
      3. Your new passion is writing about startups, and building metrics to rank them
    

Life is way too short to work on things which you're not passionate about. Why
not junk Referly and build a Crunchbase/Pitchbook/Second Market? You're
obviously putting huge amounts of time and mindshare into this, rather than
the referly magazine pivot.

Sources:

    
    
      1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4655702
      2. http://refer.ly/please-read-referly-discontinuing-rewards-paying-existing-links-through-march-31st/c/67f9d3fa890311e2bfbf22000a1db8fa
      3. http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/03/*

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phil
9gag > Square?

This is really interesting work, but the ranking system seems flawed.

~~~
dmor
I think Square is actually just on the wrong side, it should be on the B2B
list. I'm working on figuring out how to move it over.

Update: fixed

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rdl
Wow, their B2C portfolio looks really strong. If they got in in the "first
round", as their name would imply, they've made some (paper) money.

I've also heard good things about them from a lot of founders -- particularly
that they move fast.

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btrautsc
I love these, they're vastly interesting. While you're pivoting refer.ly I
hope you can sustainably produce many more. Thanks dmor

