As promised, a copy of my Master's thesis, which covers a ton of cool learnings from building #VCWiz w @DormRoomFund and @firstround, and analyzing how founders are interacting with investors when fundraising.
arxiv.org/abs/1806.03241
arxiv.org/abs/1806.03241
Most interesting learning IMO: with public funding data as the prior, the ranking generated by the closeness centrality (≈ "access") of a founder's node in an email-based graph when fundraising has a correlation of 0.7 with a ranking based on historical data and sane heuristics
In other words: we can quantitatively show that, from the founder's perspective, venture really is all about who you know!
Other cool discoveries include: 1. The bar for replacing spreadsheets as a fundraising CRM is really high 2. The infrastructure for measuring and analyzing fundraising really sucks, and evaluating one's impact is difficult (as it effectively relies on survey responses)
3. There is literally no transparency from anyone in venture (founders or Investors), and everyone is hesitant to share data 4. Better tools for researching & discovering VCs are needed and will be used, but tooling around managing outreach for founders might be overkill
5. How "important" you are matters surprisingly little when fundraising (access largely dwarfs importance), *except* in the cases where you have truly outsized importance (i.e. you are Satoshi Nakamoto starting a crypto company)
6. The number of exits affiliated with a founder is highly correlated with their closeness centrality in the global funding graph 7. Public funding data alone is not sufficient to predict social characteristics of founders (all the negative data points are missing)
8. Average email sentiment in fundraising-related communication from investors is not strongly correlated with amount of money raised or potential investor hit-rate 9. VCWiz founders spend an average of 107 days fundraising
10. Email volume between founders and VCs peaks when about 70% of the eventual set of investors is committed, and trails off rapidly after the round closes 11. Filtering out bulk emails from an inbox with heuristics is much more of a pain than expected 
12. Founders make *awesome* user testers, probably because they're so used to being on the other end 13. per-entity pages that are indexed by Google is still a fantastic SEO hack for getting more relevant traffic
14. Raising a seed as an outsider is brtual: only 35% of founders on VCWiz who reached out to investors by email (warm or cold) heard back 15. Investors don't care about inbound cold requests, even if they have a better way to manage them, unless there's evidence they should
16. VC emails are really easy to guess 17. Podcasts are fun (h/t @jennaabdou) 18. @ProductHunt is an incredibly effective way to launch (h/t @nickabouzeid) 19. Research & product-building can be balanced to create value for all! 20. @heyreiwang & @phineasb are 😍 to work with
cc everyone who asked for this: @monavernon @shapers_xyz @ken_rother @nunzi46 @changds @andychen @simanta_gautam @Hansenq @Bfaviero @smumani @InquilineKea
feel free to RT if you found this interesting and want to share the knowledge 😀
