Glassdoor for VCs

❓ Problem

Venture capital runs on open secrets. Everyone in the ecosystem knows which partners ghost, which firms quietly re-trade a signed term sheet, and which "founder friendly" funds vanish the moment a company wobbles. Nobody says it out loud, because the person you'd be calling out is the same person you'll be back pitching in 18 months.

This week that silence cracked. Greg Isenberg posted about pitching a top-3 firm for a $15M Series A while one of the GPs fell fully asleep, out cold for 30+ minutes, and not one of the 12 people in the room acknowledged it. The post detonated. Hundreds of founders piled in with their own horror stories, and Zynga's Mark Pincus described one of his own as "Weekend at Bernie's meets Silicon Valley". Founders even started naming names, which almost never happens publicly.

The stories rhyme because the dysfunction is structural, not personal. A few of the open secrets every founder eventually learns the hard way:

• The curated reference list. When you diligence a fund, they hand you their happiest founders. The ones who got pushed out, re-traded or orphaned are never on the list.
• Signalling risk. A marquee fund writes a small seed cheque, then passes on your Series A for its own portfolio-construction reasons. Every other investor reads that pass as an insider verdict, and your round quietly dies.
• The re-trade. A handshake, or even a signed term sheet, gets worse during "confirmatory diligence", right after you've told every other investor no and lost all your leverage.
• The orphaned founder. The partner who championed you and took your board seat leaves the firm, and overnight you're reassigned to someone who has never met you and isn't fussed about your company.

A 2022 Sifted survey found 75%+ of founders had faced arrogant investors or been ghosted. Getting the wrong name on your cap table is an existential risk, and yet there's still no real system of record warning you who's a nightmare before you sign.

✅ Solution

A "Glassdoor for VCs": a platform where founders anonymously review and rate the firms and individual partners they've pitched or raised from, verified, aggregated and seeded with AI so it's useful from day one.

• Verified, anonymous reviews. A founder proves they actually met or raised from an investor (a forwarded email, a calendar invite, a cap table doc), then rates them on what actually matters: responsiveness, how they behaved in the room, founder-friendliness when things go sideways, and whether the final term sheet matched the handshake. Reviews only publish once enough exist on a given partner to protect the reviewer's identity.
• AI-seeded reputation scores. An AI layer mines public signal, viral X threads (hi, Greg), Reddit, podcast call-outs and existing review chatter, into a baseline reputation score for each partner, so the database isn't a ghost town before founders show up. This is the bit that breaks the cold-start curse that killed everyone before.
• Pre-meeting backchannel. A founder mid-raise pulls a one-page brief on a specific partner before the call: the green flags, the red flags, and the three questions to ask that partner's existing portfolio founders. The thing serious founders already do by hand, automated.
• The data layer underneath. Every verified review and public signal compounds into the only founder-side reputation graph of the venture market, which turns out to be valuable to the people on the other side of the table too (more on that below).

The wedge is narrow on purpose: help one founder avoid one bad investor. The reputation graph underneath expands into fund diligence, benchmarking and the system of record venture has never had.

📊 Key Numbers

Market size

• Global investors deployed $425B into 24,000+ companies in 2025, with the US taking 64% of it. Every one of those deals had a founder on the other side who could have used better intel, and for each funded founder there are many more who pitched and got passed on.