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Comment by garry | Hacker News Reader

We're trying to figure out ways to get around this for later stage seed investments. We don't have a solution yet, but we're working on it.

In a thread below I talk about file cabinet industries — industries that basically have no software, and are horribly inefficient. Investing is absolutely one of those, but only using email and calendaring. The main bottleneck for investors is number of hours in the day, because there are very few people making all the decisions. Warm intros are the only way a non-software system can work.

So, spoiler alert, software. :-)

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>We're trying to figure out ways to get around this for later stage seed investments.

Does that mean that seed stage companies should not bother contacting you unless they can get a warm intro?

Whether stated or not, this is basically true of all professional VCs. That doesn't mean it's right or wrong, only that if you want to get funded, figure out a way to get an introfiction. It's far from impossible, even starting from nothing, and it's much easier than 10 years ago when far fewer VCs wrote/tweeted/commented in public.

By late stage for us, I was thinking that you still also have YC for the earliest stage and it's still the best way in the world to "cold pitch" someone but still have a chance to get funded and identified with no existing connections. It worked that way for me, anyway.

"So, spoiler alert, software. :-)"

This got me thinking... I really do think that better tools for sourcing deal flow are a foundational component of the next age of entrepreneurship. Crowdfunding isn't working as precisely as some have hypothesized. I'd be really curious to see how companies like AngelList & Mattermark are parsing their data to determine correlative attributes of "fundable" companies. Any thoughts/ideas on traction toward successfully automating dealflow?

I have been building my own mini version of Mattermark as a curiosity project. I'm not even interested in deal flow as much as being able to predict rising startups. In terms of being a software engineer, I look at this is a career tool.

I'm sure the bigger VCs and accelerators are building interesting things in this space but I haven't found much that's open source.

As data points, AngelList and Crunchbase are good starting places, but the AngelList API is private and the Crunchbase API is paid.

VC tweets is also a great signal. Not perfect, but great. You can most tweeted startups every week here: https://chartups.com/topstartups/

Great signal for what?

There's https://aleph.vc/meet-ampliphy-our-aleph-operating-system-47... - but AFAIK it is homegrown and not being offered to other funds.

Regarding software, have you guys used Gust [1]?

[1] https://gust.com/investors

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