nsiemsen's comments

The threadbait is so apparent. Anytime the OP replies to every comment, it's obvious.

It's a YC W21 company!

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/regent

I agree with a lot of the "how to" suggestions here. One addition is that you need to have a small number of key non-development employees really guide the development with strong opinions on functionality. This will likely mean your strongest folks in the departments that the software will serve. I would avoid building this by committee. 1-2 of your best folks who will be the ultimate end users should have massive decision-making power in what gets developed, in what order, and for what purpose.

Also, don't underestimate maintenance in your cost assumptions. Even after you've developed the product, you will need several people full-time just to maintain, update, and bug fix, let alone add new features that got sidelined during the initial development in order to meet the MVP.

Matt Levine who writes for Bloomberg is a great daily read. He posted about this about a week ago and it provides a good overview of how this type of thing is priced/insured.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-21/buffett-makes-milli...

This article [1] says that Twitter shares traded as high as $32/share on private markets prior to the IPO.

[1] http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/real-money-with-ali...

The Epicurean Dealmaker wrote a fantastic post a while back, and I will endorse but not repeat his entirely correct explanation of why IPOs are supposed to price at a discount; just go read it.

http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.com/2013/09/go-ask-alice....

The most interesting bit is: "Wednesday's proposal doesn't require companies to verify that individuals meet income thresholds set by the law, officials said. Instead, the SEC asks for comment on whether verification steps are needed." Potentially receiving funding from a non-accredited investor has been one of the remaining sources of risk to a startup taking crowdfunding.

I've scraped pretty much all of the funding and company data from crunchbase and reorganized it so that it shows a number of different insights, including what you see here: for any VC Firm, who do they co-invest with most often, and on what specific deals.

Total funding for different rounds and various time periods is also available on the homepage of the site. This data really interests me and I hope it can maybe help someone evaluate a VC Firm or to be used as a tool when fundraising.

Do you have a team that sources all your data for you or does it come from CrunchBase? (is that the CB?)

This is great! I've been working on a little project to pull in this data from CrunchBase in an interactive format.

http://peburn.com/

Data is only updated through March 28, 2013. According to what I have pulled from CrunchBase, both overall VC investment activity, and Series A are on 2011 and 2012 pace (through the first quarter of 2013). This site is a work in progress (I cannot design and I'm at my wit's end on layout), so I didn't want to share it quite yet, but this seems like a relevant time to do so. Feedback is welcomed. I have a ton of views of the data I want to implement and I ultimately want to start aggregating all the publicly-available VC Fundraising (not just company fundraising) and VC performance data here as well.

Anyways, hope it adds to the conversation.

I use Deal Drop daily on my iPhone/iPad. It's a great application, thanks for your work.