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Seems like data accuracy is a big problem. Of all the data Crunchbase collects, the individual smaller investors on seed/angel rounds seems wildly inaccurate.
by birken 11y ago
Seems like data accuracy is a big problem. Of all the data Crunchbase collects, the individual smaller investors on seed/angel rounds seems wildly inaccurate. I've just spot checked a few people who I know have made lots of angel investments and Crunchbase accounts for maybe 10% of them.
My guess is that sometimes Techcrunch lists more than 10 "notable" investors in the announcement and somebody puts that into Crunchbase, but other times Techcrunch lists a smaller number. Either way, whatever Techcrunch reports is probably unrelated to how many different investors there were.
- akharris 11y agoI agree that it's a potentially large problem, though I'd bet it's a systematic under-representation which would draw roughly the same conclusion, albeit at a higher overall rate.
- birken 11y agoIt is certainly possible, but you really don't know. Especially given that the numbers are so small, any false negatives would affect the data quite a bit. And you are making very strong claims with very precise measurements that are drawn from a very error-filled data source. A better source would be a survey sent to YC companies, or perhaps data from some internal YC database. That will have its own sampling issues, but the accuracy will be leaps and bounds above Crunchbase.