The Founder Institute’s Adeo Ressi on his plans to leave no entrepreneur behind
Adeo Ressi is best known as the founding member of TheFunded, the site where entrepreneurs can rate venture capitalists. Earlier this year, he got into the startup training business, with the launch of the Founder Institute. It’s not just a clone of better-known incubator Y Combinator. Ressi targets founders far earlier in the process, before they’ve even come up with an idea, and the Institute also introduced a new funding model, where investors in one company… Continue Reading
Change is in the air for venture capitalists
A lot of changes are in-store for venture capitalists in the second half of 2009, and recent data published by the National Venture Capital Association shows concerning trends. Venture capital firms raised a meager $1.7 billion in the second quarter of 2009, almost six times less than the $9.2 billion raised in same quarter last year. Meanwhile, firms invested $3.6 billion in Q2 ‘09, more than twice as much as they were able to bring… Continue Reading
TheFunded Founder Institute tries to tempt investors with a new financing model
Everyone knows it’s a tough time for startups raising money — for one thing, the first three months of the year saw the lowest number of venture investment since the late 90s. In response, Adeo Ressi, founding member of the controversial VC-rating site TheFunded, has introduced a new and unusual funding model to encourage hesitant investors to get back in the game.
Ressi, who is probably most familiar to VentureBeat readers as a critic of the… Continue Reading
April Fools flood begins: TheFunded’s shutdown the first prank of many?
There was some head-scratching over the weekend about rumors that TheFunded, the controversial site where entrepreneurs can rate and review venture capitalists, had been shut down due to threats of a lawsuit. But it was all just a prank by site founder Adeo Ressi.
Basically, Ressi posted a message on the site on Friday titled, “Conclusion: Investors are great” and stating that TheFunded would stop publishing reviews on April 2. Many people assumed this was a… Continue Reading
TheFunded reveals blacklisted VCs
TheFunded, the site that allows entrepreneurs to anonymously review and rate venture capitalists, has released a list of venture firms that are banned from the site’s leaderboards.
What did these firms do to get on TheFunded’s blacklist? Founder Adeo Ressi says there are three possible reasons: Suspicious activity suggesting the firms pressured chief executives in their portfolio to write or review them favorably, threatening a member of TheFunded with legal action, and failing to make new… Continue Reading
Make decisions with TheFunded’s new Topicki tool
TheFunded, the sometimes controversial site where entrepreneurs can rate and share information about venture capitalists, is beta testing a new tool. It’s called Topicki, and it’s a site for simple decision-making and management.
There are, of course, a lot of other project management tools out there, but I don’t think anyone’s really dominating the field yet. At VentureBeat, we still use email for a lot of our decisions, which kind of sucks — there’s a lot… Continue Reading
A VC sneaks into TheFunded, but the world doesn’t end
Someone claiming to be a venture capitalist managed to snag a membership with TheFunded, the site where entrepreneurs rate venture firms and gossip about fundraising, and posted an open letter to entrepreneurs. (TheFunded has a business relationship with VentureBeat.) VCs are explicitly forbidden from becoming members, and since members can rate other VCs and access private areas of the site, this is a pretty big lapse — site founder Adeo Ressi says he was “shocked”… Continue Reading
The Funded, a site of contradictions
updated
Last night, the founder of the TheFunded, the controversial VC-rating site, held a coming-out-of-the-closet event at Stanford University.
We pointed to a Wired story last night, which first revealed the founder is Adeo Ressi. That article recounts how and why Ressi launched the site. But only in seeing and listening to Ressi talk before a crowd of between 60 and 70 people did I appreciate the richness of contradictions and controversy of this man and his… Continue Reading
TheFunded founder reveals his identity
TheFunded, the controversial site where entrepreneurs can anonymously vote and comment on venture capital firms, has itself stayed shrouded in secrecy. Its founder has even kept himself anonymous, going only by the name “Ted” — until now.
Today, he has revealed himself to be Adeo Ressi, a long-time entrepreneur based in New York. Wired has an in-depth interview with him here (they also did a photo shoot with him — where we got this picture).
We’ve covered… Continue Reading