While there is an abundance of information available about companies that allows those of us not sitting in pitch meetings every day to gain insight into their growth there is still a material amount of private information that VCs get to see.
I've been in meetings with our investors where they are able to throw out information about other companies CAC or other unit economic information as well as in the trenches information about customer acquisition/growth strategies. Those aren't the kinds of things a company is going to put on their blog. They definitely have privileged information.
Sure, sure, that´s why they are still in business -- but as more information are available for everybody, their competitive advantage is getting smaller and smaller.
Plus 1: If you are not poised to be provided with infos provided by somebody that wants to sell something, as instead much more crowdsourced channels, certainly you have a different, i.e. much more biased view, on the world. Think: People will only speak with them, once they are ready for funding. Whereas people at different points in the ecosystem have a much more direct access.
Plus 2: Humans are poised to a survivor bias. It´s in the human psych to perceive only what accommodates your own world view. You made 5 bets on a business model that becomes outdated, it will you take x times longer to change your opinion. Especially as you always will try to justify your decisions as VC towards their LPs.
Do you mean crowdsourced data as something on the level of business insider articles and amazon reviews or similar?
VCs invest in new small companies where there often isnt much public info at all to go on. As a potential investor you can demand a lot of info that even employees cant get that can help evaluate the business.
Mattermark / Crunchbase / evidence in their product itself ...
Thing is, eventually, that ventures are much faster in a public spotlight as tech gets easier..
I agree on everything re startups only shedding a positive light on their business - but if you are following a company disclosing x users in year 1 and y users in year 2 (especially as they start fundraising /PR), it is no rocket science anymore. Two more Google searches and you know the market size etc. --- VCs used to have proprietary infos, that´s why they were put onto stages to talk about their "magic" insights. But that has changed imho.
I'm a little skeptical of the accuracy of the info released to the public.
Thing is, companies lie when they talk to the press. Or they release a number with no context behind it, which will be interpreted differently by outsiders than insiders. Or the press makes up a number when the company refuses to release it. Or the company chooses not to get press coverage for an event that's pretty important.
When I've had inside information about a story that later breaks in the tech press, I'm always shocked at how differently it's perceived by readers of the article vs. how I experienced it. Among startups & major feature launches I've been party to, I've seen: executives that flat-out say that they're not working on a product category when there's been a whole department devoted to it for a year; startups that were founded 1.5 years before the dates listed in Crunchbase/Wikipedia; reporters that count the number of people they meet in a visit and report that as a the "team size", because the company refuses to release that info; funding rounds that never make it to the press; acquisitions that are reported as "for an undisclosed sum" but actually are less than the founders would've made if they'd taken a salaried job at the company; project start dates that are actually when the project was staffed up to its current size and ignore the year or so that a small team spent working on the problem (or the 3-4 years that other small teams spent working on the problem); and algorithms or other technologies that are widely reported as being the core of the company's success, but actually aren't even used by the company.
I figure that if such a high percentage of what I do know about is misreported, most of what I don't know about but hear from the tech media is probably wrong too. Ironically, the effect of having a little inside information isn't to make me feel well informed; it's to make me realize how uninformed everyone else is, often including top decision-makers at companies.
The insider stuff is definitely what's interesting, for example there are quick facts that help you calibrate your assumptions that are very hard to come by. They're usually the things that companies don't want to talk about. They write articles about the things they're doing well, it's not common to get real time "yeah these are the problems they're still figuring out, maybe you should avoid copying their strategy" info.
I've been in meetings with our investors where they are able to throw out information about other companies CAC or other unit economic information as well as in the trenches information about customer acquisition/growth strategies. Those aren't the kinds of things a company is going to put on their blog. They definitely have privileged information.