Last night i was invited to the private site, TheFunded.com. The site provides entrepreneurs with access to ratings of venture capital companies as well as personal contact information of VCs. While it provides a good opportunity for disgruntled entrepreneurs that have not received funding, I don’t think it provides much of a benefit to anyone else. While the concept is a good one, I don’t think people will use it for its intended purpose.
Since the majority of the postings are posted anonymously, there is practically little value in using the information provided by the site. If you are an entrepreneur looking for funding, use this site to come up with a list of potential VCs to contact, but don’t use it as an end all be all resource for research. I would have rather seen this site as one that allows entrepreneurs to pitch their business plans to VCs and then provides the contact information of the entrepreneur to the interested VC. I think the site brings one-sided transparency. Had they made the transparency equal on both sides, there would have been an incredible amount of value. A social network consisting of investors and entrepreneurs would be amazing. Anyone know of an existing one?
March 21st, 2007
One Response to “TheFunded.com: Giving Complete Access to Entrepreneurs”
March 21st, 2007 at 6:21 pm
As a member, you see the detailed PRIVATE feedback on the site that provides detailed insights on (1) who to contact, (2) who to avoid, and (3) how to approach various funding sources. Once you identify a target fund or a fund contacts you, TheFunded provides invaluable and **otherwise unavailable** information on the fund. There is simply no other resource for an entrepreneur to do vital research on a funding prospect.
The alternative is to ask the fund for references, which involves calling other CEO’s that the funding source itself provides. How objective is that call going to be?
Anonymity on TheFunded allows the real information about funding source to be shared. The good news is that greater than 60% of the posts are positive with cautionary advice for pitching a deal.
Like anything, it is a tool to be used. The data, so far, has been excellent, posted by entrepreneurs who have done deals.