- VC Guide describes itself as an NPS for VCs, a site where founders can rate and review their experiences with venture capitalists, the money folks who power Silicon Valley.
- Some of the reviews rave about a particular VC, some of them describe pitch meetings that went awry and are downright brutal. VCs are allowed to respond.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
VC Guide is a new website run by an unknown entity that allows founders to rate venture capitalists on a scale of 1-10 and post reviews about them. It describes itself as an NPS (Net Promoter Score) for VCs.
A site that allows founders to read reviews of investors is not an entirely bad idea, although we’ll have to wait and see how this particular site grows with its anonymous comments, some of them brutal. Still, as any startup founder will tell you, an investor relationship is like a marriage. As owners of the company, investors and founders have to see eye-to-eye on the company’s futures or boardroom battles will breakout. It’s also a contractual relationship.
The venture capital world in Silicon Valley is a culture onto itself. It is populated by a mix of people with a mix of backgrounds, ranging from wealthy former tech founders who got rich on their own companies and know their stuff to those with finance backgrounds who absorb founders into their well-oiled networks to those who engage in questionable behavior and wind up in the hot seat.
Some of the reviews discuss which VC has offered “exceedingly non-standard term sheet that harms companies,” which one is a “legend,” and which one is “really a hidden gem in the investment community.”
As Business Insider cannot verify the identities of the founders or the validity of their comments reviews, we will refrain from naming which VCs have gotten raves on the site and which have not. But as of this writing the site has 43 pages of reviews and some of the same VCs who received harsh reviews have also received more positive ones. The site also allows VCs to respond.
We found such comments as:
“Extremely kind, very supportive … but indexes on what her VC friends say to make a decision.”
“One of the enterprise SaaS greats in the investing world.”
“Not helpful at all and prone to boastful exaggerations bordering on straight up lies”
“started off really strong … but then he just ghosted”
“cut us off about 5 minutes in and spent the rest of the hour lecturing us about how our product would never work”
Reading through the site is like reading the internal dialog of an everyman tech founder.
VC Guide did not immediately respond to our request for comment.
