At TiEcon, we have a Pitch2VC session. We have over a dozen VCs to whom entrepreneurs can pitch. So if you are an entrepreneur to pitch to vc, how would you go about looking at them? What if a VC had to pitch to you? I took the easy way out and did a small test. I went to a VC’s website, in this case Canaan Partners and did the following:
1. Copied the home page text
2. Copied the text from all the pages under About Us
Took this text and gave it to Wordle to create a tag cloud. Here is the result.
3. In addition I went to Hubspot’s Website Grader and graded their site. I will let you do this on your own, but there were some pretty impressive stats.
Why did I do this? I consider the home page and About page as two most important parts of a VCs pitch. How can this be improved?
1. Get the text for the whole site (or some of the pages that you think will be useful – like portfolio companies).
2. Automate this process of gathering information and creating a tag cloud. I think it will be an interesting mini-project.
4 thoughts on “Taking a Quick Look At a VC”
Nice stuff Dorai. However, the link to Hubspot’s website grader is pointing to Cannan’s Home page 🙂
I did a similar stuff some weeks back where i wrote a crawler to get stuff out of the home page of companies (basically gave a text file as input which had links to all the URLs of home page) and then passed it through another script which generated tag clouds. Will try Wordle now 🙂
Good fun stuff though.
Cheers
Vaibhav
Thanks Vaibhav. That is what I intend to do (may be a mini Django app). I think letting the user choose which aspects of VC they want to know about (provide a few check boxes) may be interesting as well. For example, if I am a game design company, I want to know what this VC has done in that field.
There are some neat tips tucked in behind all that text. Will work on it some more. An ideal project for a startup hackathon.
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