In the process of redesigning our website, and in our day to day activity as investors, we’ve looked at hundreds of venture firm websites, and after a while they all blur into one.
Some firms have probably had the same realization and decided to build something different (I can think of only a few: NeuVC, Blueyard, Fundomo) but all in all, it’s still always the same thing. some vague explanation of what the firm looks for, if you’re lucky some areas of focus, then portfolio and team.
I’m not saying this content isn’t useful, but it doesn’t really tell you that much about the firm.
So, in our constant obsession of having to do things differently, we really started thinking about: what do founders really want to know when visiting our website? What do we want them to get out of the experience?
Some firms have had the same realization, and have been an inspiration. I can think of First Round with their FAQs on the homepage and Bloomberg Beta with their operating manual on Github. These are both great efforts in the right direction.
But at Unruly, we like to break rules, and always crank it up to the max.
So today, we’d like to unveil something completely new in venture capital firms websites: a maximum transparency venture capital dashboard.
In answering the questions above, we realized that founders really want a peek under the hood. They want to know how much we invest, how often, in which companies, which categories, how many we’ve done and how many we’re still going to do.
Founders’ time is scarce and so they are looking to access enough data to understand three things:
- Are we “good” investors;
- Are we the right investors for them, and;
- What are the chances we'd invest in a company like theirs
This will inform their decision of engaging with us or not.
The wild part? We already have all of this data in our internal dashboards, so it’s not really too hard to share. Hence, from today, our public website is actually just our internal dashboard made public.
The dashboard will display (almost) all of our data, including but not limited to:
- Closing date
- Amount raised
- Amount deployable (so raised minus fees)
- Amount deployed
- Amount left to deploy
- Number of deals done
- Deals per quarter
- Amount invested in each company
- Date of investment for each investment
- Round of investment of each company (pre-seed, seed, etc.)
- Average, min, max check size
- Average, min, max valuation
- Average, min, max ownership
- Most invested categories
- Most frequent co-investors
- MOIC (for non-active funds)
- Follow on reserves
- Write offs
This is currently available for our Fund I for of all of my pre-Unruly investments (including angel investments, Mission and Market, and Atomico Angel Programme), and will be available on a per-fund basis as we raise subsequent funds.
This is all usually thought of as confidential data, but we don’t think it makes that much sense to keep it confidential. Most other firms already know most of this about us, and if they don’t they ask us and we tell them. Same with LPs. Same with founders. It’s just natural to make it all public.
Venture capital is one of the most opaque industries, and while there are reasons for this, it often leads to some shady tactics that frustrate founders:
- Some firms might not have capital to deploy, but still want to look at deals and not “sit the market out”.
- Some firms usually invest $100k, but might want to show larger shoulders to prepare for future funds.
- Some firms might pitch a specific thesis, and then invest in completely different businesses.
- Some firms say they do seed, but end up doing a lot of logo shopping at Series B-C.
- Some firms will announce a massive fund, but will only have raised a tiny part of that - creating distortion in the market and inflating founders’ hopes.
We see no benefit in these practices. Instead, we believe in the massive benefits of making all our data public. Our bet is that this approach will:
- attract the right type of founders
- save time explaining our operations to founders, VCs, and LPs
- maintain high accountability
In an ideal world, all VC firms would have all of this data publicly available, and we can imagine a future in which founders will demand it.
This is why we are going to make our website open source and encourage any interested firm in copying and using it. I'll personally sit down to help you get it set up including data storage, customization and deployment.
Obviously, this is just the starting point for us. We wireframed, designed and coded this up in two weeks with our friends at Belka. As a YC alum, I live by their most frequent advice: make something people want, and launch early. So here it is!
We have countless ideas for new features to add and are already working on a few ones. If you have any feature requests or ideas, don't be shy and let us know! (It goes without saying that our founders have been informed of this, and aside from a few cases where for different reasons we’ve had to obfuscate some data, everyone has been massively supportive of this initiative)
Special thanks toRiccardo, who created a demo version in just two days, convincing us to invest more time to make it happen. And a shout-out to Baremetrics'Open Startupswhich came back to mind when the designers asked for some reference ideas. As much as I’d like to think my ideas are original, it turns out I often just borrow from memory the brilliant things others have done.