“If you have good people, proprietary technologies, and a high growth market you will win every time (Tom Perkins)”
To understand the financial performances of a VC firm is not an easy task, without some kind of paid access to sources like: Dow Jones Venture Wire. In the case you just want to know about the structure of the firm, its investment strategy, the portfolio and the team, the web is a good source of free information. Following you can find a list of sources:
- Crunchbase: is the free database of technology companies, people, and investors from TechCrunch. A very interesting analysis of the database is offered via BuzzSparks
- Bots: neubot is a bot that looks at VC portfolio pages every night
- VC professors webpage: professors specialized in VC and Entrepreneurship. They often publish interesting papers in the SSRN website or the NBER webiste
- Books: in the webpage of the authors, and in some appendix of the books, you can find good sources of information. An interesting book describing VC firms is: Venture Capital and the Finance of Innovation. From this link you can download some chapters of the book
- Organizations: Kauffman research documents, European VC association, British VC association are some of the associations releasing interesting reports about VC firms
- Research papers: PWC money tree is a good read
- VC website: the VC firm website is often the best starting point
- VC blogs: a good list is provided by Larry Cheng
- Videos and presentations: some sources are Vimeo, Youtube, Docstoc, Scribd and Slideshare
- Events website: Noah or EVCA websites have links to presentations from the speakers
- Platforms: AngelList, Quora, Twitter, SecondMarket and LinkedIn
Now that you know where to search which firm you would like to analyse?
