Up until now, if you wanted to see the ratings of individual venture capitalists on TheFunded, you had to be an invited member, which meant that you had to be the CEO or founder of a company (or pay $200 for six months access and prove that you are a senior adviser or consultant). But now anyone who visits the site can see the ratings for 17,000 individual VCs without logging in (before only the ratings for entire VC firms were publicly available). Only members can rate VCs.
Many of the ratings are still spare. Some VCs don’t have any, or only a couple. For instance, John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins (4.5 out of 5), only has two ratings, indicating that perhaps he is not as active as he once were (or that entrepreneurs are too scared to rate him, even anonymously). But for those who have at least three ratings, entrepreneurs can now compare them to the overall rating of their firm. It shouldn’t be any surprise that some of the big hitters in the VC world rate highly, like Sequoia Capital’s Michael Moritz (4.4 out of 5, versus 3.9 for Sequoia) or Roelof Botha (4.1). Dick Kramlich at New Enterprise Associates rates a 4.8, compared to 3.4 for his fund.
But every venture firm has some partners bringing down the average. For instance Mark Kvamme at Sequoia has an abysmal 2.9 rating, a full point below the firm’s average. Other notable VCs and their ratings (out of a maximum of 5):
Bill Tai, Charles River Ventures: 5.0
Joshua Kopelman, First Round Capital: 4.4
Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures: 4.3
Tim Draper, Draper Fisher Jurvetson: 4.2
Steve Jurvetson, Draper Fisher Jurvetson: 3.0
John Hummer, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners: 1.2
Erick – I think you have a typo in the 1st line of the 2nd paragraph (I believe you meant to write “sparce”.
Keep up the great work!
That’s helpful even more
I still think entrepreneurs can help themselves out by viewing terms of previous venture capital deals at http://www.pedatacenter.com .
Looks like most of the negative reviews on TheFunded are along the lines of “The VC kicked me out of his office 10 minutes into my pitch!” Maybe your pitch sucked and not the VC?
This site gives entrepreneurs the illusion of knowledge. A little data can be a dangerous thing. I find it interesting that mob knowledge is afforded such high status considering that the conventional wisdom is usually wrong.
@1:
if it were “sparce” it would be spelled “sparse”
i think he meant “spare” — as in “barren, not lavish, sparsely-populated”
@Thomas: The reality is that there is NO information on venture firms outside of self-generated web sites and self-reported return numbers (”IRR”), so any insights into this secretive world by any third party is better than… nothing. While 7,000 CEOs that comprise TheFunded.com Membership may rightfully be considered a “mob,” they are also the best third party available outside of the investors in venture firms (who are also Members of TheFunded.com) to provide the ratings. Just something to think about.
If John Hummer is a 1.2 then Mitchell Kertzman must be a 1.0.
These ratings are meaningless. They need to be rated by how many companies they bring to success and how many people they screw on the way there.
Who rates them at the moment? Unsuccessful applicants?
@baah-baah-the-black-sheep: If the ratings are meaningless, then how do they so closely correlate to IRR and partners that generate the IRR? Sure, there are exceptions whereby (1) a viscious and self-centered partner can fire management teams and achieve some IRR and (2) whereby a lazy and unintelligent partner can invest in a luck pot of gold, but these exceptions are not the rule.
If anything, TheFunded is showing a DIRECT correlation between how a venture firm treats entreprenurs and how the fund returns. In fact, the new partner ratings is showing that this is also just as true with the individuals as it is with the firms. A great partner can make the firm, the returns, and great companies…
Interview with Adeo Ressi, the man behind TheFunded http://uk.intru...d-com_a400.html
We all already know that self-selected gripe sites tend towards bad data, but the interesting part is when the data reveals outliers on the bell curve. I would use this data, were I a startup seeking VC funding, to target my pitch to the more receptive partners at the review firms. Wouldn’t that be showing the kind of intiative and smart thinking VCs love to see?
Just posted some further thoughts on the partner pages and how to interpret the new partner ratings.
http://www.adeo...-partner-pages/