Fully Baked #20: VC Vetting

💡 An idea resurfaced by a viral thread

🔬 We validated this idea - here's what we found

🚀 The go-to-market playbook for this product

🤑 What do the unit economics look like?

⚔️ How the competitive landscape looks

❓ Our verdict: is this a go or no-go idea

VCs are known for a lot of things: wearing Patagonia vests, spending an inordinate amount of time of Twitter…and occasionally investing into high-growth startups. But sometimes VCs can behave badly, as this viral thread proved this week.

Around 24,000 companies raised VC in 2025 and many multiples of that pitched and got rejected, usually by partners they knew nothing about, with no system of record warning them who's a nightmare before they sign. It’s time to surface that intel for founders. Here's how.

A platform where founders anonymously review and rate the VC firms and individual partners they've pitched or raised from, verified, aggregated, and seeded with AI

Founders join the platform, verify they actually met or raised from an investor (a forwarded email, a calendar invite, a cap table doc) then anonymously rate them on how they were to work with (responsiveness, how they behaved in the room, founder-friendliness etc.)

An AI layer complements this data by mining public signal from viral X threads, Reddit and podcast call-outs into a baseline reputation score per partner.

Venture is gigantic and opaque. Global investors deployed $425B into 24,000+ companies in 2025, yet only around 0.05% of startups ever raise VC - meaning for every funded founder there are hundreds pitching into a black box with no way to vet who's sitting across the table. Fundraising itself just hit a decade-low $118.6B in fund closings as LPs tighten their diligence, which makes hard data on GP reputation more valuable than it has ever been.

"How do I do diligence on an investor?" is an evergreen question with no good public answer. Founders swap VC intel in DMs and private WhatsApp and Slack groups because there's no shared source of truth.

The viral thread is the single best demand signal we could have asked for: hundreds of founders publicly admitting they've been mistreated, and finally naming names. It echoes a 2022 Sifted survey where 75%+ of founders said they'd faced arrogant VCs or been ghosted. The timing is perfect to create something like this.

Seed with public data first: Don’t launch an empty review site - use the AI layer to pre-populate reputation scores from public sources so the very first founder who visits sees value immediately, then gets nudged to add what they know.

Accelerator backchannels: YC, Techstars and EF batches are full of founders raising simultaneously and already comparing notes in private. Get the tool into a few batch Slacks as the shared "investor intel doc" and let it spread founder-to-founder.

SEO on every partner name: Every founder Googles "[Partner Name] [Firm]" before a meeting. Own that search result with a structured profile page and you capture the highest-intent moment in the entire funding lifecycle, for free.

Sell the data to the other side: Once you have coverage, LPs running diligence on funds and emerging managers benchmarking themselves will pay for aggregated reputation data. That could be a pretty durable revenue line moving forward.

Free for founders: Browse reviews, leave verified reviews, basic partner profiles. Founders are your supply - never charge them.

Pro ($29/mo, founders): Pre-meeting backchannel briefs, alerts when a partner you're talking to gets new reviews, side-by-side fund comparisons.

Intelligence (custom - LPs, funds, accelerators): Aggregated reputation data, fund benchmarking, founder-sentiment analytics. This is where the real money is.

Target CAC: ~$0-5 for founders (almost entirely organic via SEO, the viral moment, and word of mouth)

Founder LTV: modest, and that's fine - most won't pay, but they're your data moat

Data/LP LTV: $5,000-50,000+ per institutional account. A handful of LP and fund customers can carry the whole business.

The trap: if you try to monetize founders, you starve the supply side and the data dies. Monetize the people doing diligence, keep it free for the people generating the reviews.

TheFunded (2007, faded out): The original anonymous VC review site, by Adeo Ressi. Met with open derision from VCs, the founder eventually got outed, and it slowly died. The lesson is clear - anonymity is everything, and the VC world is small enough to break it.

Landscape (free for founders, VCs pay): The current "Glassdoor for VC", launched 2020 out of the UK. Thousands of founder reviews across 12 criteria (approachability, response time, diligence), plus a scout marketplace and an anonymous founder community. Solid execution, but still niche, Europe-weighted, and reliant on founders bravely submitting into the void.

VC Guide (2020): Verified founders post public, often brutal comments. More burn-book than data product, and coverage stays thin.

AI finally cracks the cold-start problem - you can build the reputation graph from public signal (threads, podcasts, forums) before a single founder logs in, but then layer the first-hand data from founders on top of that.

Similarly, no one has built this as a data business pointed at LPs or others interested in this data who have real budgets and a genuine diligence need.

Have an idea you want feedback on? DM me to discuss it or book in for Office Hours here.

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