The Multi-Billion Dollar Face-Lift: A Founder and Funder Love Story
RateMyInvestor is disrupting the world of venture capitalism in all the right ways.
It’s an online platform where founders have the opportunity to leave honest reviews on investors and venture capitalists. Balancing the startup ecosystem, RateMyInvestor unlocks access to previously exclusive information, ultimately cultivating accountability and transparency where it never existed before.
Founders have ideas — brilliant, flawed and everything in between — and they understand it takes money to make money. When it becomes time in a startup’s life where outside capital is necessary to continue growing, the difficulty of finding the right investor unfolds. The interactions between these two parties have historically been tilted in the investors’ favor and have existed behind closed doors.
Until now.
Starting a company is an enormous challenge, so challenging in fact that over 90% of all startups end in failure. The roadmap to that twinkling idea of your company’s success and survival is a long and bumpy road, and securing a boost of cash flow in the form of private capital, is only one stop on the journey. Although funding is just one stop, it’s a dense and time-consuming one. The founder-to-investor relationship can be likened to that of a marriage. You’re in it for the long haul, for better or worse, so finding the right investor can understandably take time. Getting the right investor on-board from the beginning can make or break your company. That’s why most experienced founders recommend starting your search for capital 12 months before you need it.
This is where RateMyInvestor comes into play. It can be used as a tool to provide crucial and rapid insight for founders during this vetting process; a progressive tool that will ultimately democratize the world of venture capitalism, adding a layer of transparency that never previously existed.
So, how does it work?
Think along the lines of Yelp for investors. Anyone can go to the website to browse investor reviews and leave reviews for the investors they have interacted with. The option to remain anonymous ensures the protection of the founder while also encouraging authenticity and honesty in the feedback. By allowing founders to rate the investors or leave tips and advice, future founders don’t have to face as difficult of a learning curve as previous founders.
So what about the investors?
On the flip side, investors will have the ability to ‘Claim’ their profile in order to address potentially negative feedback and manage their online reputation.
It is not a bashing tool. RateMyInvestor is a platform allowing founders’ voices and experiences to be heard, and more importantly, a place where the entrepreneurial community can go to gain quick insight on decisions essential to their company’s survival.
Ready to contribute your own review? Click here.
Read about our recent acquisition of Know Your VC, and how we plan on cultivating transparency in the venture world.
