Zombie VC Post – The Bug Report

What source should they use for their research? The phone. Everybody in the investor community knows who's investing and who's not. You just pick up the phone and call someone you're on good terms with, or you make sure to ask 'who else should I be talking to?' at the end of a meeting. If you want info on a specific firm, you say 'Is X a good fit? Are they investing right now?' I've rarely gotten anything but a completely forthright answer.

If you're looking to use some independent data source that doesn't involve talking to people (which is the wrong way to go about it because fundraising is inherently a social networking exercise), I'm not sure all the data is universally public. The best source for brand new financings (although not follow-on rounds) is probably the Twitter bot VCDelta (twitter.com/vcdelta), since VCs tend to be good at updating their portfolio pages. Perhaps you could also get institutional fundraising information from the Form Ds (formds.com).

I suspect the Crunchbase data will only get worse as the importance of TechCrunch continues to shrink.

I used to maintain the investor database at an investment bank and I can say, without any doubt, that the Crunchbase data is really, truly terrible. There is simply no one in place with the right incentives to make sure that the data is updated/cleaned with any regularity. Dow Jones VentureSource and Thomson ONE have databases that track venture capital rounds fairly accurately, although obviously there are a ton of deals that are never exposed to the outside world, and there are rarely regulatory requirements that such things be disclosed.

Even when you have the data though, it's hard to tell which investors are actually still doing deals. There are a lot of small funds out there that may not do a deal every 6 months even when they are still actively looking, perhaps because they are in the tail end of their investment period and are trying to be very selective, or perhaps because their typical bite size is large relative to the capital they have to deploy. There are also investors who will tell you that they are continuing to look at deals even when they aren't in a position to invest because they don't have committed capital and it doesn't look good to be out of the market. So all around it's a pretty fuzzy condition that you are looking to describe.

Of course, having a list is still nicer than not having a list, because if you simply "tap your network" for active funds, people will just think about who they've interacted with recently, rather than actually having any knowledge about the specific proclivities of the country's hundreds of venture capital firms, organized angels, etc. It's easy to overlook reasonable candidates.

Why are you looking for "active" VC's? Why is that a metric? It seems to me that if I were looking for a VC I'd be on the lookout for those who make fewer, more conscious investments, instead of the standard fund that just shotguns their money and plays the numbers.

Side Note: A little game theory... it's probably not a good idea to use a data source (crunchbase) that is heavily influenced by those who you are currently negotiating with. Sounds a little like back in 2007 when Goldman and Co were the ones rating the same junk securities they were trying to offload.