Ask HN: I Built A Business Funding Visualizer For SEC Filings. Any Feedback? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I Built A Business Funding Visualizer For SEC Filings. Any Feedback?

formds.com

27 pointsai0913 comments

HN,

Form Ds are filed with the SEC by startups, hedge funds, and growing companies to announce the completion of fundings (equity and debt) but there's no way to search for companies near you. I built a Google maps visualizer that takes the daily SEC filings and overlays them on Google maps.

For example of a Form D, here's SeatGeek's (current top story on HN) Form D filings:

http://www.formds.com/issuers/seatgeek-inc

I'd love feedback on my Google Maps visualization.

Things I know I need to add:

Ability to zoom in on an area and see filings from the last week or month.

Ability to save the areas you're interested in (instead of the whole US loading every time)

Tech thing to change:

I'm writing out the javascript using Rails' erb instead of a javascript function pulling from a JSON object. I just saw the SeatGeek guys use a JSON object + function for their raphael visualization and realized that that's what I should be doing...

Thanks for any feedback!

Wow, Fitbit just did a nearly $8MM round - unless Brad Feld was already an investor, I'm guessing led by Foundry?

Form Ds are traditionally a pain to go through - you could probably make this a subscription service for tech journalists.

Yes, it's new. As in an hour old!

Some reactions:

- works well on iPad

- should have a by-date visualization

- by-industry should show counts and also allow date filtering.

- good name

- is there historical data?

Feel free to drop a line for further feedback.

Thanks, Joshua. I appreciate the feedback.

I'm going to build the features you suggested very soon. Another HNer suggested something like: http://www.google.com/finance/stockscreener and I will enable that type of view to filter by industry, date, and size.

Regarding historical data, digital filings only exist after March 2009. Before that the SEC used a paper form that the SEC would scan and put online. The scanned PDFs would need to be injested via OCR and humans. Thomson Reuters already does this and I'm sure it's expensive.

When I have the beta of your suggestions up, I'll try contacting you via Twitter since I don't know how to contact you otherwise. If you'd prefer to email me your contact info, I can be reached at robert@#{website_from_this_post}.com

Thanks,

Robert

What are all these exchanges of hundred-million dollar capital funds? Is that normal?

Investment funds are generally subject to Form D filings since they don't do "public" offerings as defined by the SEC. So yes, billion dollar hedge funds do file for raising massive amounts of money.

One more note, "Amended Filings" will show the highest amount of money raised to date. To determine how much money was raised recently, you need to subtract the underlying "New" filing and any subsequent amended filings. The SEC's data structure makes it difficult to get amounts of all the referenced filings to do this automatically (basically to 'diff' the filings) so I leave it to readers to do. Example: http://www.formds.com/issuers/mount-vernon-securities-lendin...

See also http://stealthmodewatch.com -- reported here a while ago but didn't get much attention.

Love the info and focus domain, not crazy about the map-based presentation. Except to the coarseness of metro-region, state, or region, the geography is the least interesting aspect of this info, so the click-one-pin-at-a-time presentation is very limiting.

More ways to group the info and show comparables over a longer period together would be very interesting.

Thanks for the feedback. I have another set of visualizations coming soon I think will address your suggestion regarding comparables over time. Your suggestion is spot on.

As to stealthmodewatch.com, I thought the creator (you?) did a great job of getting launch coverage in TechCrunch. A very, very good job. I got a link in TechCrunch the second day my site went up (for breaking the Dave McClure 500 startups launch) but stealthmodewatch.com got a whole article. Well played!

Edit:

I thought about your suggestion more. Does the most recent listing of filings help? http://www.formds.com/filings

Regarding drill down, is 'by industry' informative?

http://www.formds.com/filings?grouping=industry&industry...

(Fitbit funding at top of that list)

I'm not affiliated with StealthModeWatch -- I found out about it on HN, and was surprised the submitted stories didn't get many HN votes:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1651315 (one of those 3 upvotes is me!)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1666022 (didn't even notice this one at the time)

Yes, the 'recent' and 'by industry' listings are nice. The data set seems small enough, though -- by either day or even last few months -- that it'd be nice to have a longer page, with more details, and 'instant' filtering by amounts, regions, industries, terms, etc. Something like Google Finance stock screener on the last year of Reg-D filings would be awesome:

http://www.google.com/finance/stockscreener

That stockscreener idea is genius. I was planning a more basic version but your suggestion is even better since people are already used to that format. I'll start building this this weekend - Do you mind if I email you a beta version for feedback before I put it live next week?

Don't mind at all! Eager to see what you cook up.

Thank you. Your idea provides a great way of addressing joshu's feedback. I'll email at the address in your profile when I have things working.

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