There is a lot of content created by the Venture Capital community that has helped countless entrepreneurs. In fact, one of my favorites is How Andreessen Horowitz Evaluates CEOs.
I recently stumbled upon the article again and it reminded me of an article I’ve been meaning to write for my entrepreneurial friends. We’ve all heard the horror stories (fairly or unfairly) of how Venture Capitalists have screwed over the founders of companies.
What we rarely hear about is the enormous value that some in the Venture Capital community create when investing in a startup. Whether it’s strategic help, introductions to customers, joint ventures with other portfolio companies, and just plain fair dealings. I want to help narrow your choices by providing a starting point.
How was the list determined?
I created the VC guide using state of the art sentiment analysis technology from Lithium(formerly Scout labs), confidential reviews from entrepreneurs on TheFunded.com, and four surveys that I issued across four different social platforms. I also looked for mentions of individual VC’s on Quora to gain additional insight.
The result is the top 30. If your company is fortunate enough to be working with any of these people then you’re working with a fair and devoted individual. Using Lithium’s sentiment analysis tools, attributes like helpful, fair, brilliant, profitable, amazing, and knowledgeable are consistent attributes for this group.
It’s important to note that this is not an influence or popularity list. The list was created to identify the people in the Venture Capital community that people respect most. Of course this is not the definitive list but in my research this group came out on top.
Ranked #1, Brad Feld had this to say on earning the respect of Entrepreneurs in the Venture Capital industry: “I try hard to be straightforward and transparent. I do what I say I’m going to do and I’m very open about my thinking (seewww.feld.com).”
COMMENTARY: , According to Wikipedia Sentiment analysis or opinion mining refers to a broad area of natural language processing, computational linguistics and text mining. Generally speaking, it aims to determine the attitude of a speaker or a writer with respect to some topic. The attitude may be their judgment or evaluation (see appraisal theory), their affective state (that is to say, the emotional state of the author when writing) or the intended emotional communication (that is to say, the emotional effect the author wishes to have on the reader).
The main problem with this list is that there are many more well respected VC's who didn't make the list because they don't get a lot of press coverage and don't get a lot of mentions social media sites ecause they may not be involved in high visibility deals like Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, Groupon, Foursquare, etc., to name a few. Guys like Brad Feld, John Doerr, Ben Horowitz, Marc Andreesen, Michael Moritz, Brad Wilson, Paul Grahm have all gotten a lot of press and show up in numerous social media updates nearly every day. Just this week I have written about nearly all of them in one way or another. The only female that made this list is Sharon Weinbar from Scale Ventures. Come on people, there have got to be more female VC's than that.
Courtesy of an article dated February 2, 2011 appearing in Cloudave
Comments