I’ve posted here several times about The Funded, which seems to me like an extremely useful database of venture capital firms, with reviews and comments added by entrepreneurs. This is a good resource for those rare high-end startups that are actually real candidates for venture capital. (You know who you are; and, in fact, if you have to ask, then you aren’t.)
Now, apparently, there’s another good site, with a different approach, but also offering useful related information. My thanks to Guy Kawasaki for his News Flash yesterday on his How to Change the World blog:
This morning young Matt Winn told me about a tool he created called the VCDB (venture capital database).
Indeed, you should check out this tool because it’s quite useful. You can enter “bio keywords” and find venture capitalists. You can also enter locations, and the tool shows you venture capitalists in the area.
And as I post this, I’d like to just add, as a reminder, that the days of sending shotgun blasts of hopeful messages to a database of venture capitalists are — if they ever even existed in the past, which I doubt — long, long gone. The correct use of a database like this is to pinpoint investors who might have the right kind of match and interests. You need quality targets, not quantity.
This article is part of our Business Funding Guide: fund your business today, with Bplans.
Tim Berry is the founder and chairman of Palo Alto Software and Bplans.com. Follow him on Twitter @Timberry.
