A friend asked me the other day “Which VC firms should I pitch?” and I started to respond to him, but then realized that most of my knowledge of VC firms is already available online in the Which VC firm should I pitch? Hunch decision topic. That is the idea behind Hunch: to crowdsource the creation of decision trees, so that a group of knowledgeable people can get together and create a “virtual expert” that can be accessed by anyone.
Here is the VC chooser topic in embedded widget form (anything you create on Hunch can be embedded anywhere):
Which VC firm should I pitch? – make thousands more decisions on Hunch.com
Like everything on Hunch, this topic is completely user generated (“topic” is our word for what some people would call a “decision tree”). Users have full control over the questions it asks, the results (in this case VC firms), the descriptions, and a lot of more advanced functionality for “sculpting” the decision tree. If you go to the VC topic’s About page you can see that so far 7 people have contributed 86 firms and 5 questions to this topic (other topics have a much wider range of contributers, this one for example). The VC topic has been played (used by non contributors) 506 times, many of those users coming in via Google organic results for phrases related to pitching VC firms.
In addition, the results are all “trained” to be associated with responses to questions – meaning users have taught Hunch what to “believe” about each of the firms. For example, in red is what Hunch believes about Union Square Ventures:
Users who find mistakes can just click and fix them, similar to how you fix things on Wikipedia.
So if you see anything missing or that you’d like to change, feel free to do so. I was one main people who worked on this particular topic so it is biased toward my tastes (e.g. Hunch’s own VCs – Bessemer and General Catalyst – rank extremely high).
If you don’t like Hunch’s Q&A process you can jump directly to the See All page, and then using the filters on the left to drill down.
If you are not logged into Hunch, the VC firms you see will be ranked by their popularity amongst all Hunch users. Hunch personalizes the rankings specifically for you if you create an account and answer what we call “Teach Hunch About You” questions. For example, when I am logged in and go to the Hunch page for Bessemer I see this on the right sidebar:
Meaning that Hunch has learned to statistically correlate the questions I’ve answered about myself with liking Bessemer. At this point Hunch has statistically significant data (over 40M user feedbacks total) in most of our ~5000 topics so it usually works really well.
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Just for fun, I used Hunch for this topic recently and I got almost exactly the results (firms) I thought I would get, wanted to get, and am actually pursuing, as well as a couple of suggestions for some other strong firms. Nice work, Chris.
Great! Our long term goal is for people to have enough good experiences like this that eventually come to use Hunch as an everday tool.
I would think that a native mobile app would be in order (maybe in development already)… at the very least, I can imagine myself directing someone to a Hunch app when they can't make a decision…
yep, coming very soon…
Ha… I totally understand. Definitely a better pitch.
Need beta testers? Happy to test (for the iPhone).
East Coast + software = Union Square & Bessemer. Hard to argue with those answers.
Yeah, the more beta tester the better.. I'll email you. Thanks!
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“Teach Hunch About You” sounds like Netflix's star rating…it rates movies based on my prior ratings of similar movies. I like Hunch's approach better – give me both, since what the algorithm thinks I might like, might not be what I actually like, which has been the case.
But this brings up something…I remember Amazon (or Netflix) having a patent fight on the algorithms it used to create its recommendations (“If you like this, then you might like that”). Would such an algorithm, like the one Netflix uses (and presumably Hunch) be so generic that you couldn't patent it or infringe? No where near a patent guru, but curious.
I'm curious (if you want to answer/know yet) how the “Teach Hunch About You” section is being used to inform the results of individual questions, or are the data sets being kept separate for now? I wouldn't think that the type of art I like would inform the right VC firm for my startup…but that'd be interesting if it did!
PS Also happy to beta test an iPhone app if you need more looks.
Thanks! I like our approach better too
There are a lot of patents out there, but also a ton of prior academic art.
Hunch rocks!
I'll test from iPhone as well if it helps.
Hunch rocks!
I'll test from iPhone as well if it helps.
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