

Ask HN: I Built A Business Funding Visualizer For SEC Filings. Any Feedback? - ai09
http://www.formds.com/visualizations/geo

======
ai09
HN,

Form Ds are filed with the SEC by startups, hedge funds, and growing companies
to announce the completion of fundings (equity and debt) but there's no way to
search for companies near you. I built a Google maps visualizer that takes the
daily SEC filings and overlays them on Google maps.

For example of a Form D, here's SeatGeek's (current top story on HN) Form D
filings:

<http://www.formds.com/issuers/seatgeek-inc>

I'd love feedback on my Google Maps visualization.

Things I know I need to add:

Ability to zoom in on an area and see filings from the last week or month.

Ability to save the areas you're interested in (instead of the whole US
loading every time)

Tech thing to change:

I'm writing out the javascript using Rails' erb instead of a javascript
function pulling from a JSON object. I just saw the SeatGeek guys use a JSON
object + function for their raphael visualization and realized that that's
what I should be doing...

Thanks for any feedback!

------
gyardley
Wow, Fitbit just did a nearly $8MM round - unless Brad Feld was already an
investor, I'm guessing led by Foundry?

Form Ds are traditionally a pain to go through - you could probably make this
a subscription service for tech journalists.

~~~
ai09
Yes, it's new. As in an hour old!

------
joshu
Some reactions:

\- works well on iPad

\- should have a by-date visualization

\- by-industry should show counts and also allow date filtering.

\- good name

\- is there historical data?

Feel free to drop a line for further feedback.

~~~
ai09
Thanks, Joshua. I appreciate the feedback.

I'm going to build the features you suggested very soon. Another HNer
suggested something like: <http://www.google.com/finance/stockscreener> and I
will enable that type of view to filter by industry, date, and size.

Regarding historical data, digital filings only exist after March 2009. Before
that the SEC used a paper form that the SEC would scan and put online. The
scanned PDFs would need to be injested via OCR and humans. Thomson Reuters
already does this and I'm sure it's expensive.

When I have the beta of your suggestions up, I'll try contacting you via
Twitter since I don't know how to contact you otherwise. If you'd prefer to
email me your contact info, I can be reached at
robert@#{website_from_this_post}.com

Thanks,

Robert

------
AmericanOP
What are all these exchanges of hundred-million dollar capital funds? Is that
normal?

~~~
ai09
Investment funds are generally subject to Form D filings since they don't do
"public" offerings as defined by the SEC. So yes, billion dollar hedge funds
do file for raising massive amounts of money.

One more note, "Amended Filings" will show the highest amount of money raised
to date. To determine how much money was raised recently, you need to subtract
the underlying "New" filing and any subsequent amended filings. The SEC's data
structure makes it difficult to get amounts of all the referenced filings to
do this automatically (basically to 'diff' the filings) so I leave it to
readers to do. Example: [http://www.formds.com/issuers/mount-vernon-
securities-lendin...](http://www.formds.com/issuers/mount-vernon-securities-
lending-trust)

------
gojomo
See also <http://stealthmodewatch.com> \-- reported here a while ago but
didn't get much attention.

Love the info and focus domain, not crazy about the map-based presentation.
Except to the coarseness of metro-region, state, or region, the geography is
the least interesting aspect of this info, so the click-one-pin-at-a-time
presentation is very limiting.

More ways to group the info and show comparables over a longer period together
would be very interesting.

~~~
ai09
Thanks for the feedback. I have another set of visualizations coming soon I
think will address your suggestion regarding comparables over time. Your
suggestion is spot on.

As to stealthmodewatch.com, I thought the creator (you?) did a great job of
getting launch coverage in TechCrunch. A very, very good job. I got a link in
TechCrunch the second day my site went up (for breaking the Dave McClure 500
startups launch) but stealthmodewatch.com got a whole article. Well played!

Edit:

I thought about your suggestion more. Does the most recent listing of filings
help? <http://www.formds.com/filings>

Regarding drill down, is 'by industry' informative?

[http://www.formds.com/filings?grouping=industry&industry...](http://www.formds.com/filings?grouping=industry&industry=Other%20Technology)

(Fitbit funding at top of that list)

~~~
gojomo
I'm not affiliated with StealthModeWatch -- I found out about it on HN, and
was surprised the submitted stories didn't get many HN votes:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1651315> (one of those 3 upvotes is me!)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1666022> (didn't even notice this one at
the time)

Yes, the 'recent' and 'by industry' listings are nice. The data set seems
small enough, though -- by either day or even last few months -- that it'd be
nice to have a longer page, with more details, and 'instant' filtering by
amounts, regions, industries, terms, etc. Something like Google Finance stock
screener on the last year of Reg-D filings would be awesome:

<http://www.google.com/finance/stockscreener>

~~~
ai09
That stockscreener idea is genius. I was planning a more basic version but
your suggestion is even better since people are already used to that format.
I'll start building this this weekend - Do you mind if I email you a beta
version for feedback before I put it live next week?

~~~
gojomo
Don't mind at all! Eager to see what you cook up.

~~~
ai09
Thank you. Your idea provides a great way of addressing joshu's feedback. I'll
email at the address in your profile when I have things working.

