Mattermark

Hired.com. If you don't want to deal with a lot of BS and are able to make decisive choices, you can't go wrong.

Otherwise, you end up interviewing at places were recruiters are just trying to get another body in the door and half of them are not prepared.

I was very skeptical but it got the job done.

http://join.hired.com/x/XfELvW if you want to toss me a referral but honestly, it doesn't matter to me either way. The quick decisive moment is the hard part but Hired.com really does take care of the rest.

Also Mattermark is hiring and I would encourage anyone interested in full stack or dev ops to apply: http://mattermark.com/jobs/ (other business roles are on there too)

Why Hired.com is good: if you are a bad negotiator, you'll learn very quickly that you need to filter out jobs early on based on salary expectation. Nobody talks to engineers/geeks about that. But once you go through the hired.com process, you realize that hey, it's an open field -- you can establish up front what your criteria are in terms of compensation and discuss that early in the potential interview process. Because time is money, hiring is complicated and compensation is all over the place. You are the best judge of your value. It's complicated. But you are also the best judge of what you'll accept in terms of tradeoffs (cash vs equity).

Everyone single person who contacted me via my Hired.com profile was a founder (or a recruiter pretending to be the founder). Either way, I got a great summary…

A team at Morgan Stanley or wherever looks at the company's numbers (cash flow, debt, growth rate, etc), and comes up with a valuation based on very concrete factual information.

What if I told you that these "concrete factual information" numbers are just as made up as Daily Active Users, Monthly Active Users, number of downloads, etc. It doesn't matter what the number is, it's just whatever the market values. Right now the market values the numbers behind DAU, MAU, because well... Facebook and Google exist. They set the precedent of valuing MAU/DAU and have made money doing it, so the assumption is that any other company that also values these same metrics should follow suit.

Where I think we are in full agreement is the fact that DAU/MAU is not fungible. Meaning, the same 3hrs a day someone uses Facebook isn't the same 3hrs that someone uses twitter. But, lest we forget, the market is irrational.

EDIT: The fact that this "Mattermark" number exists explains the story even better than I can: http://mattermark.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/fundersclubporfolio.png

Cool idea! A few random ideas and thoughts that may or may not be useful:

1) seems like a perfect complement to something like mattermatrk: http://mattermark.com/ perhaps try reaching out to those guys? They offer startup tracking so pairing it with this fantasy-investment style game could work well.

2) learning from fantasy football - perhaps you get people to sign up in groups and compete against each other with new money being released into the pool each month/quarter?

3) you could bring people back into the app when the startups they have invested in get in the news? This would involve building a lightweight RSS-scraper and some logic but might not be too hard and would add a nice feedback loop for the product.

4) maybe you let people use (small amounts of) real money to invest in the startups, and let people buy and sell their investments? Kind of like a second market platform? this would make it inherently more compelling for people to stick around but it's almost certainly a lot more work to build...

Hi Sam, I was able to pull some data on these things via Mattermark.
http://mattermark.com/yc-portfolio-stats-mattermark-crunches-the-numbers/

267 companies currently have 2 or more employees

8,164 people are currently employed by a YC company [1]

121 companies have disclosed an exit (no IPOs, all acquisitions so far)

66% of YC companies are based in the Bay Area, followed by New York (7%) and Boston (2%)

76 un-exited companies have raised a venture round of funding (Series A or beyond)

There is a nearly 50/50 split between B2B and B2C startups in the portfolio

The average Series A stage YC company has 26 employees and has raised $10.2M of funding in its lifetime.

[1] The total number is probably much higher, many of these companies do not have LinkedIn pages or employees on LinkedIn, Crunchbase, news, and other sources until they are further along. I think an estimate of 9,000 to 10,000 current jobs created by current YC companies is reasonable.

AFAIK they haven't. The way they score [1] seems to suggest that they might be missing out on companies like https://gorickshaw.com and enterprise focused companies because these company might not perform well on mobile downloads, inbound links, twitter followers, facebook followers and linkedin followers (the six metrics they track and score on).

I personally feel that inbound links, twitter + facebook + linkedin followers don't add all that much to painting a complete picture of the companies that might not be in the "social" space but I feel that if they keep at it long enough and keep iterating, they will eventually figure out how to be less wrong (Even most top VC firms aren't able to consistently pick only winners).

[1] https://mattermark.com/mattermark-score/

Does this mean Mattermark https://mattermark.com/ have started a tech arms war amongst the larger VC firms to create their own toolsets to differentiate their deal flow from others?

Mattermark has gone some way to provide proof that data can make a difference, at least at highlighting opportunities that might not have been visible before. I wondered whether this would result in herding investors towards some companies, which means differentation and opportunity comes from spotting things the others miss... finding the outliers that Mattermark miss.

Interesting that the test is "make a dashboard", well into the standard skillset for most analyst programmers who work for financial institutions (I built a lot of this stuff for the finance sector in London).