Ask HN: How do you find the right VC investors? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you find the right VC investors?

1 pointjohncole3 comments

How do you find your VC investors? I recently tried to help a friend who's raising funding for her startup. I defaulted to using Pitchbook, but I wondered if there is a better service that can help me generate a short-list (maybe even ranked list) of VC's she should be approaching?

Is there somewhere I can go (other than Pitchbook) to get that list, or find those investors?

To be clear, this post is not looking for investor recommendations, I'm looking to learn how others do this, (how others make this list of VC's to reach out to or approach).

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VCs tend to have specializations, the best way is probably to look into the background of the individual partners. If there is a good match there then a direct approach has a fair chance of working.

I don't see much value in the various services in this domain, they tend to have outdated information, do a crap job of filtering (both positive and negative) and can be a negative signal to a VC if they are the ones making first contact. Always make sure you own the relationship from day #1, lots of these services are just leadgen for the financial service providers ('corporate finance') who would love a slice of your pie, regardless of whether or not you manage to get funding. If you do engage a corporate finance company make sure they only get paid a fixed fee if they succeed, and make sure that they are non-exclusive.

All this makes sense, thank you. Filtering on the partner level is a great idea, since there can be a lot of variance in partners among firms in terms of what they invest in.

I have heard basically the process is do research on competitors, use Crunchbase or Pitchbook. Is that about right?

We use their website(s) (past and present through wayback) and then we spend a lot of time researching the individuals and the portfolio companies. Crunchbase/Pb can be wildly inaccurate and incomplete but is a nice starting point.

Portfolio companies and partners that disappear without press releases usually require extra scrutiny.

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