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> And of course there is another possibly — maybe hundreds of startups collectively decided to stop announcing their funding rounds? There is also a much simpl
by birken 12y ago
> And of course there is another possibly — maybe hundreds of startups collectively decided to stop announcing their funding rounds?
There is also a much simpler explanation... there is a lag in when seed rounds happen and when they are announced. The fact that the most recent data point stands out as a massive outlier is a strong indication of this possibility. Simple to check as well, we can look at this same plot in 6 months with the back filled data and see if the conclusion is the same.
Jumping to conclusions for the sake of a headline is fine, that is Techcrunch's job after all. But for those of you that do data analysis for your own companies, be careful when jumping to conclusions. If you see a massive outlier on your graph like this, more often than not it is a data collection/sampling issue than a giant change in the world. And of course if you do think it is a giant change in the world, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So there shouldn't be a caveat, which if true, completely disprove the whole conclusion.
- 7Figures2Commas 12y agoYou also need to consider the source of the data. From what I understand, much of Mattermark's data comes from Crunchbase, and the categories in the Mattermark chart[1] mirror categories on Crunchbase. Crunchbase is by no means a comprehensive source of all deals. As an example, I work with a company that raised a seed round in Q4 2014. Crunchbase does not have this funding despite the fact that it's public. For the deals that Crunchbase does have, the categorization can be very spotty. For instance, you can find $2+ million party rounds with institutional investors categorized as "Seed" while there are sub $1 million rounds categorized as "Venture" or even "Series A." There are also oddball categories like "Debt Financing" and "Convertible Note" which in some cases appear to be the same thing. In my mind this is almost certainly a case of garbage in, garbage out. [1] https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/screen-shot-2015-01-16-at-2-35-10-pm.png?w=680&h=514 https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/screen-...