Last week at the American Economic Association (AEA) annual meeting in San Francisco, we co-hosted a session with our partners at the Kauffman Foundation. Attendees included academics, research, and business professionals from various institutions.

We shared a presentation focusing on CrunchBase data sources, and several examples of our research initiatives. CrunchBase data is unique, due to our engaged community of users who update company and team profiles. We validate funding data with the venture community through the CrunchBase Venture program. To profile companies who are actively fundraising, we partner with AngelList, EquityNet, AgFunder and others. By actively tracking RSS and Twitter, our team keeps on top of all recent fundings profile in the CrunchBase Daily. All of these programs, over time, build out the connections within the global entrepreneurial community.

Gené Teare, Head of Content at CrunchBase

A component of the session were lightning presentations from academics leveraging CrunchBase data.

Sandy Yu, a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley, studied the efficacy of accelerator programs. One of her key findings is that accelerators help resolve uncertainty around the quality of an idea through frequent mentor feedback. In other words, founders learn quickly if an idea is viable, and if not, they fail faster, rather than investing more time and money.

Sandy Yu, Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley

Andy Wu, a PHD candidate from the University of Pennsylvania, researched group decision making within venture firms. He contrasted this with individual investment decisions by influential VCs. His findings determined that making decisions as a group did not improve outcomes.

J-F Gauthier, CFO at Compass, the creators of the Global Startup Ecosystem Ranking, discussed tracking the growth of core ecosystems around the globe through survey analysis, interviews, and augmenting the survey data with the CrunchBase dataset. The ecosystems with the most growth in VC were Berlin (12x), Bangalore (4x), Boston (3.7x), Amsterdam (2x), and Seattle (2x) according to the report.

J-F Gauthier, CFO at Compass

Within the last year, over 1,000 Academics and postgraduate students have accessed the CrunchBase API for research initiatives.

If you’re an undergraduate student or bootcamp, you can request the 2013 Data Snapshot. Postgraduate students and academics can request access to the CrunchBase API. Please visit data.crunchbase.com for more information.

  • Originally published January 14, 2016