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Start-Up Reviews: ChubbyBrain

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I am usually not a big fan of web sites offering "reviews and rankings" of funded start-ups, like ChubbyBrain. One often does not know much about the credentials of the reviewers.  ChubbyBrain is a bit different, in that the reviewers are clearly identified by name and affiliation, such as Satya P. at Battery Ventures.  You can become a fan of Satya if you are interested in his investing space and learn about new companies that he is following.  I do doubt, however, that Satya or other VC based reviewers are going to publicly expose their potential investments until they have a signed term sheet.

ChubbyBrain is still in beta, so the number of companies and detailed information on the companies is limited. I did find some interesting start-ups that bear further exploration from an investing perspective. However, many of the reviews read like Amazon book reviews, which can be useful if you are looking for consumer/user rather than technical feedback on a start up.

One can also search by investor and find out what interesting companies they have in their portfolio.  Again, information is limited, often just one or two companies per investor, as investors apparently have few reasons to update the site.

It would make sense for the fledgling start-up to get listed on ChubbyBrain as well as get some users to review the product.  Very few information sources exist on how users like or dislike the experience of working with a start-up. Alternately, bad reviews can hurt you, especially if sites like ChubbyBrain become more influential in determining consumer choice.

Finally, a note to the ChubbyBrain entrepreneurs: your company does not come up in your web site search engine. I would consider adding your company to the list of start-ups.

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One response to “Start-Up Reviews: ChubbyBrain”

  1. Jonathan Sherry Avatar
    Jonathan Sherry

    Dear Dave,
    I’m one of the ChubbyBrain platform’s founders and wanted to say thanks for the review and suggestions.
    Think you hit on some great points with reference to the review aspects of ChubbyBrain. Beyond our desire as you noted to minimize anonymous reviews, we’ve also taken steps to reward those who write good reviews with greater influence in determining aggregate company ratings.
    So, simply stated, not all ratings are created equally with some reviewers’ ratings potentially worth as much as 6 times as other reviewers. This we hope will help to (1) prevent gamesmanship and (2) also serves as a way to reward those reviewers who offer the most insightful commentary with greater exposure and access to enhanced capabilities & functionality on ChubbyBrain. These progressive levels of expertise are determined based on an algorithm that measures quality and consistency of reviewer contribution. In case you’re interested, the levels of expertise are detailed in this table:
    http://www.chubbybrain.com/faqs.php#6
    Beyond the reviews aspect, however, one of our primary goals is to democratize information about investors and startups as historically, it has been either been (1) scattered and unstructured or (2) available to a limited few who could afford multi-thousand dollar subscriptions offered by large information services providers. Some of our team formerly worked in VC and several of us most recently managed a large corporate innovation fund, and the underlying premise for ChubbyBrain emerged from our frustration that this information was generally very inaccessible and even when available, it was offered on information services platforms that were hopelessly outdated and expensive. And so through the thoughtful application of technology as well mass collaboration, we set out to change this. Ultimately, this type of information transparency benefits investors, entrepreneurs as well as a whole host of other constituencies.
    Just yesterday, we loaded up the portfolios of several Australian, Israeli, UK, Canadian and Indian venture capital firms and the portfolios of several of the most active US-based angel investment groups as well.
    Here’s a post from today about the Indian venture capital and angel investment firms we just loaded up:
    http://www.chubbybrain.com/blog/2009/04/chubbybrain-global-coverage-indian-venture-capital-angel-investment-firms/
    At present, there is not an alternative that offers this much information about angel- and venture-backed startups and the investors themselves across everything from green/clean tech to healthcare to web2.0 to all things in between. That said, the breadth and depth of the information will continue to increase, and we look forward to sharing these and other new developments with you over time.
    In the interim, if you have any ideas on how to make the platform more useful to an investor like yourself and/or to the community at-large, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
    And lastly, per your suggestion, a profile for ChubbyBrain will be created quite soon. Great catch.
    Thanks again.
    Warm regards,
    Jonathan Sherry
    jsherry(at)chubbybrain(dot)com
    http://www.chubbybrain.com

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