The TechCrunch List
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Raising VC is tough. Submit your investors today to our first-check database, The TechCrunch List
When we announced the formation of The TechCrunch List last week, we had no idea what response we would get to our proposal for founders to recommend their “first-check” investors. While plenty of founders over the years have told us that they wanted such a database to rely on or to refer to other founders who are raising for the first time, there is always something nerve-wracking about launching a new product and waiting for feedback.
Well, the TechCrunch community came through, since in just a few days, we’ve already received more than 500 proposals from founders recommending VCs who wrote their first checks and who have been particularly helpful in fundraising and getting a round closed.
If you haven’t submitted a recommendation, please help us using the form linked here.
The short survey takes five minutes, and could save founders dozens of hours armed with the right intel. Our editorial team is carefully processing these submissions to ensure their veracity and accuracy, and the more data points we have, the better the List can be for founders.
We’ve gotten quite a few questions about this new initiative, so we wanted to answer some common queries.
First check into each round: We want to know who wrote the first check that helped catalyze a round at each stage of a startup. So it’s okay to submit a name for each round.
Only one recommendation per early-stage round: We are holding the line on only allowing one name per round though. We realize that party rounds are not uncommon at the angel and seed stages, but a list of 30 people who all “led” a round is precisely what we are trying to avoid with the List. So keep the recommendations to one name, please, or if you can’t, it’s best not to recommend anyone at all.
Deadline: There is no single deadline. We intend to publish a first draft of the list in the next two-three weeks, so earlier submissions are more likely to be processed in time for the draft list. Our goal with The TechCrunch List is to make it an up-to-date and living product, and so we intend to update it regularly with new information as we learn it. So it’s a rolling deadline.
Founders only: While we certainly appreciate VCs offering to humbly submit their own names for consideration, we really want to hear from the founders themselves who did the fundraise. Feel free to reach out to your founders to submit — many firms have already done so if our early data is any indication.
People not firms: We are obsessed about moving beyond firm brand names and instead identifying individual partners on recommendations, since ultimately, founders work with a person and not a brand.
Weighting: We’ve been asked how we are “weighting” the submissions. The simple answer is that we are (mostly) not weighting them. In addition to fact-checking and verifying each submission, our main consideration is a basic assessment of a startup’s quality — what was the size of the round, has it raised any follow-on financing and any other public displays of performance. The TechCrunch List isn’t assessing investor quality (there are plenty of other lists in our industry for that), but rather assessing the willingness of an investor to write a “first check.”
Keep submitting those names, and reach out to us if you have any questions.
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Who’s writing first checks into startups?
Over the past two decades, the venture capital industry has exploded beyond anyone’s wildest imaginations.
What began as a sleepy industry in Boston and Menlo Park has now expanded to dozens of cities the world over. The National Venture Capital Association estimates that VCs deployed more than $130 billion in 2018 and 2019, and thousands of new investors have joined the ranks in recent years to find the next great startups.
All that activity, though, poses a dilemma for founders: Who actively writes checks? Who is a leader in a specific market or vertical? Who has the conviction to underwrite pathbreaking investments? Who, ultimately, do you want to have by your side for the next decade as your startup grows?
There are lists that rank VCs by their exit returns. There are lists that rank young VCs by their potential. There are lists of VCs who claim investment interest in various sectors. There are lists that try to ferret out deal volume, impact and other quantitative metrics. There are internal lists at accelerators that share collective wisdom between founders.
Who actively writes checks? Who is a leader in a specific market or vertical? Who has the conviction to underwrite pathbreaking investments? Who, ultimately, do you want to have by your side for the next decade as your startup grows?
All those lists and rankings have an important function to serve, but for all the compilations of investors out there, we couldn’t find a single one that publicly answered a simple yet vital question: Who are the VC investors who are leaders in specific verticals who should be a founder’s first stop during a fundraise?
Today’s venture industry is made up of thousands of investors with varying specialties, and far too many passive investors that are willing to participate in rounds but don’t actively participate in deals unless other investors have committed. Many don’t actively push to get deals done or don’t actively lead the charge to build a syndicate of investors.
With all that in mind, we’re excited to launch a new initiative that we hope will help answer those questions and help founders find that first check — The TechCrunch List.
Over the next few weeks, we’re going to be collecting data around which individual investors are actually willing to write the proverbial “first check” into a startup’s fundraising round and help catalyze deals for founders — whether it be seed, Series A or otherwise (i.e. out of your Series A investors, the first person who was willing to write the check and get the ball rolling with other investors). Once we’ve collected, cleaned and analyzed the data, we’ll publish lists of the most recommended “first check” investors across different verticals, investment stages and geographies, so founders can see which investors are potentially the best fit for their company.
Founders are used to being specialized; after all, they have to live and breathe their startups every single day. So it can be jarring to start talking to generalist investors who know little about a category and ask shallow questions only to render a judgment with irrelevant advice. One of the greatest impetuses for us to put together The TechCrunch List is that like founders, we also struggle to cut through the noise around the interests of individual VCs.
We’d argue that’s close to impossible. There is more spend on technology than ever before in history. Verticals are getting more competitive — market maps that used to have 10 to 50 companies have expanded to hundreds. The only way to compete today is to specialize, and that has never been more true for VCs.
In all, The TechCrunch List will publish the most recommended “first check” writers across 22 different categories, ranging from D2C & e-commerce brands to space, and everything in between. Through some data analysis around total investments in each space, we believe our 22 categories should cover the entirety or majority of the venture activity today.
To make this project a success and create a useful resource for founders, we need your help. We want to hear from company builders and we want to hear from them directly.
To make this project a success and create a useful resource for founders, we need your help. We want to hear from company builders and we want to hear from them directly. We will be collecting endorsements submitted by founders through the form linked here.
Through the form, founders will be asked to submit their name, their startup, the stage of company, the name of the one “first check” investor they want to endorse and a couple of minor logistical items. We are asking founders here for their on-the-record endorsement. We ask that you limit your recommendations to one (1) person per fundraise round.
While many investors may have helped you in your journey, we are specifically interested in the person who most helped you get a round underway and closed. The one who catalyzed your round. The one who guided you through the fundraise process. The one investor you would ultimately recommend to other founders who are trying to find their VC champion.
Our main goal is to help founders, dreamers and company builders find investors who will invest in them today, and with your help, we think we can. The TechCrunch List is not meant to identify every possible investor under the sun who might make an investment within a space, nor just the big household-name VCs whose reputations can sometimes seem more linked to their follower counts on Twitter as opposed to their bold term sheets.
Our hope is that this can be a go-to resource for founders looking to fundraise going forward, and with that in mind, we are very determined to improve the glaring representation gaps in the venture industry. It’s no secret that the world of VC still looks like a country-club membership roster, dominated by white men with strong opinions and loud voices. Looking at the data, it’s clear that there are groups that are particularly underrepresented, with only a small portion of the industry made up of Black, Latinx and female investors, for example.
We want to amplify these voices and we want to hear particularly from founders of color, female founders and other underrepresented groups. We also want to make sure our recommended investor lists are sufficiently representative and highlight underrepresented investors who might not have had equal opportunities in the past.
We want to help builders wade through the BS politics and fundraising annoyances that founders complain to us about on a daily basis, and help them identify qualified leads that are actually active, engaged and specialized and are the best fit to help founders raise money and grow now.
Thank you for your support. We’re excited to build The TechCrunch List with you — and for you.
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How we’re rebuilding the VC industry
The venture capital industry is less transparent today than at any time in recent memory.
For all the talk about expanding access and improving its sordid record on diversity, in reality, it has never been harder for founders to figure out who can even write a check to their startups in the first place.
When I first returned to TechCrunch after my second stint in venture capital, my first piece was entitled “The loss of first check investors.” While working in the venture capital industry, it was maddening to see — particularly at the pre-seed and seed stages — how few investors were really willing to go out on a limb and invest in founders before another VC had committed a check.
It’s only gotten worse in the past two years since that article, and the complexity comes from a number of different places. As our investigation showed more than a year ago, fewer and fewer venture rounds are being announced through SEC Form D filings.
There are almost no publicly accountable datasets left indicating who is writing checks in the venture industry and which companies are receiving those checks. While stealthiness is valid in the early days of a startup, the excuse wears thin after years.
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