Editor’s note: Guest author Huston Hedinger is the Founder and CEO of Wikisway, a Portland Seed Fund alumni company. He founded Wikisway while finishing his Master’s in Policy, Economics, and Social Network Analysis at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Before Wikisway, Huston worked for Village Capital with startups in the Middle East. You can connect with him directly at Huston.Hedinger@wikisway.com or @hustonhedinger.
For entrepreneurs, investors, and journalists CrunchBase is the go-to resource for startup related research. We believe the most important aspect of CrunchBase is the relationships between people and organizations. We wanted to make it easier for the startup community to understand these relationships so we built the Wikisway Beta Platform, a powerful visualization of CrunchBase’s already rich content.
A Powerful New View of the World
Wikisway presents a powerful new view of CrunchBase, by showing how people, places and things are connected. Here is Marissa Mayer’s network on Wikisway. You can see people in dark blue, financial organizations in green, and other companies in light blue. But it’s not just a pretty picture:
- Click nodes to reveal information about that person, company, or investor.
- Click links to reveal information about the relationships between nodes.
- Double click nodes to open up their networks of relationships.
Let’s say I am interested in Marissa Mayer and her investment in Minted. I can just double click and open up Minted’s connections where I find other investors including Brady Wood and Niniane Wang. If I continued to explore investments that she’s made, I’d notice that many of the founders were former employees at Google.
Insights through Patterns in Information
In another example, let’s look at Urban Airship, one of our favorite Portland companies. On their page in green, I quickly see two investors that I have heard are great to work with Foundry Group and True Ventures. Now what I really want to know is what kind of companies are these investors both attracted to? Wikisway’s visual interface allows us to find the answer in just seconds.
We love the startup community and we’re thrilled to have built something that allows everyone to easily find connections between companies, their founders, and investors. We believe that the Wikisway technology has applications across a broad set of online data and we’ll be rolling out a number of exciting new sets of content over the next nine months. We’re pioneering an important new approach to understanding information online and we’d love to know what you think. Come see what we’re up to at www.wikisway.com.
