“First of all, you have to grease the local politicians for the sudden zoning problems that always come up. Then there’s the kickbacks to the carpenters. And if you plan on using any cement in this building I’m sure the teamsters would like to have a little chat with you, and that’ll cost you. Don’t forget a little something for the building inspectors. There’s the long-term costs, such as waste disposal. I don’t know if you’re familiar with who runs that business. but I assure you it’s not the boy scouts.”

How much has their “secret recipe” missed? How would Namesys have rated in August 2006? IMO way, way too little data and way too many wildcards. This is still the Wild West with still many uncharted routes.

Being surprised by some smart new service doesn’t happen everyday in the cluttered, copycat-prone world of web start-ups. YouNoodle offers to automatically valuate start-ups through an algorithm. It takes many criteria into account, such as the team s…

now I am getting spammed by 100s of jagoffs.

thanks

I would say TechCrunch should be worth a $100 million by then…

The thing that is really intriguing is the questions that it asks.
For instance, it asks for the age of the founder and the team members and for information about the relationships between them.
It makes you wonder what bearing age plays on the success of a start-up?
It also asks about the skills that all the parties bring to the table, their experience and their connections to people who may be able to help make the start-up a success.

Yes, you get a score and valuation at the end. But is not the real benefit the ability to then respond to the outcome, for instance exploring what will happen when you add in a new skillset to your team.

What YouNoodle has emphasised is that one of the crucial factors determining whether a start-up will succeed (perhaps The crucial factor) is not actually the business concept, the idea, but the people who will make it happen.

For what it’s worth, I pushed Goodson to say what impact he hoped YouNoodle’s Startup Predictor would have: “I would like to see a situation in 10 years where we laugh about the fact that technology like ours was not used,” he told me during a pre-briefing like the one you received.
Embed YouNoodle’s technology in an investment process that is ultimately determined by an experienced and well connected investor and I think he’s on to something.