
Show HN: $4.4B in Startup Funding Rounds Visualized - viggity
http://www.machete.io/board/view/seed_db_funding_rounds/157a518b-cbf2-4bde-84b4-98cfa0bc15ba
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viggity
I created this with a new service I released (Machete). Machete is built on
top of dc.js (which in turn is built on d3.js and crossfilter). dc and d3 both
have decent learning curves, Machete is aimed at non-programmers or as a
prototyping tool for developers.

The visualization works best in chrome or any edge browser. In the off chance
you're a huge Luddite and surfing HN with IE8, here are a couple extracted
stats across the 2,040 rounds:

YC dwarfs other accelerators with $2.8B in funding, next largest is AngelPad
with $185M.

Average A Round - $4.3M, B - $17M, C - $58M, D - $98M

Airbnb and Dropbox so skewed stats, that I created a filterable attribute for
them called "Freakish_Outlier".

I should be on for a couple hours, please feel free to comment or ask
questions.

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CGamesPlay
Looks good. There are two things that will be really important:

\- How is data imported? It would be great to be able to set up custom SQL
queries, CSV imports, and other service gateways to do analytics on.

\- How do I define graphs? I'll want to be able to do time-series, but easily
switch between day/week/month/year resolution, and create trailing period
averages without having to think about it.

I signed up for the beta. I'd love to play around and do some deep diving on
stats we have collected.

~~~
viggity
Right now we only support CSVs they get served directly from blob storage to
the browser (without going through our webserver). We obviously want to expand
on those options, but CORs makes serving from internal company data sources a
PITA. We could use our domain as a proxy to the relevant info, but that has
its own issues (auth, perf). I'm sure we'll be able to work it out though.
Automated CSV imports will probably be the best way to do things initially.

When you import your CSV, we take educated guesses about the data in each
column (number, category, date), but you can change it if necessary (sometimes
numbers should be treated like categories). We give you the ability to group
dates by day of week and month. Month-year isn't in there yet, but should be
by launch.

It works best one un-aggregated source data (since we do so all the fine level
aggregation ourselves in the browser). Dealing with weighted averages is
possible and we've done it a lot in custom work, but machete doesn't yet have
support for it.

Thanks for the kind words :)

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fancyremarker
Anyone know why Dropbox is considered a Dublin-based company? Shouldn't their
SF office be considered the main HQ?

~~~
XorNot
What are the tax laws of Ireland like this time of a year?

~~~
PMan74
Soft day, thank god

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codemac
Where are you getting the data for this? It seems to be missing a fair number
of startups that have had significant (>20M) rounds.

~~~
viggity
[http://www.seed-db.com/companies/funding?value=1](http://www.seed-
db.com/companies/funding?value=1) plus a little extra meta-data from
crunchbase. Seed-DB (so far as I can tell) only tracks startups that went
through an accelerator. We've got a larger list that includes everyone, but it
made viewing the accelerator info more difficult because there are so many
startups that haven't gone through one.

We'll probably create another board with all startups but will probably do it
on a company basis instead of a funding round basis. There are a lot of
different ways you could want to see this data.

If you sign up for the beta, we'll let you know when you can create your own.
We're following the github model - public projects are free, private projects
have a modest fee.

~~~
balls187
> Seed-DB (so far as I can tell) only tracks startups that went through an
> accelerator.

You should alter the HN post's title to reflect that.

~~~
namenotrequired
You think so? I read the title and it never crossed my mind to think it was
_all_ funding. To me the fact that it says "this much of it" already implies
it's a selection.

Edit: that said, the page should definitely mention it (the source and
selection criteria).

~~~
balls187
It wasn't apparent from the title that this data was mostly from Seed-DB, and
partly from Crunchbase.

Seed-DB is accelerator based funding, and the crunchbase data that was used is
incomplete.

It lists Seattle behind Atlanta in terms of Startup Funding.

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stephenhess
Surprised to see so little startup activity in the Seattle area. Is there a
reason for this? - in spite of what I expect to be a pretty serious pool of a
talent drawn in by Amazon and Microsoft.

~~~
balls187
The data is missing a lot of Seattle based startups.

Including some of the larger non-exited startups:

Chef raised 65 million. INRIX 78.1 million Avalara 84.6 million

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pgt
Awesome idea. The name, "Machete" is fine, but the logo is too aggressive.
Consider something more playful, like a smiling machete, or ASCII art of Danny
Trejo :D,
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Danny_Tre...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Danny_Trejo_2009.jpg)

Just kidding. But seriously, a friendlier logo would make me more likely to
try the service. Best of luck!

~~~
viggity
ASCII Art of Danny Trejo, lol. I can certainly say we did not consider that
for our logo. I like where your head is at though. The name "Machete" was/is a
bit of a risk, I'll definitely remember your feedback when we re-do it. It
currently was just a quick and dirty fiverr job :)

~~~
angersock
It's an awesome logo, don't wimp out. :)

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akavi
What's the data source?

Is it the rapid increase in total raised from 2012 - 2014 (even without
Freakish_outlier) a data artifact or has the amount of funding actually
exploded?

~~~
viggity
Every company in this dataset went through an accelerator, my guess is that it
is due to the explosion in accelerators after YC's success. (Hell, I'm from
Iowa and we have one now and two more are opening in the summer).

We've got another dataset that has more companies (ones that didn't go through
accelerators). There is more data so we wanted to re-work and re-aggregate
some of the data on a company level instead of a round level. We'll probably
release it in a couple days.

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sogen
It's almost impossible to click on Grant, and other. Suggestion: Make the
Title a part of the Label area.

~~~
viggity
Took me a second to understand what you are saying, but YES, that is
definitely on our backlog. It's a PITA when item has very small clickable bar.

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henryw
Wow, YC-accelerated companies has captured 64% of the 4.4B.

~~~
minimaxir
You can thank Dropbox for a large chunk of that.

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cturhan
dc.js as always made a good job.

