Founders’ Top 5 Free Resources for Financing Data and News

There are a lot of resources out there for financing news. Here are our top 5 go tos:

Crunchbase (surface-level funding round data)

• Frequency: We search CB pretty much every day for a quick and dirty look at companies’ capital profiles.
• What you get for free: You can see all Form D raises with the following data: the investors, the round type, stage, size and, sometimes, who led.
• What you get for paid: Crunchbase Pro gives your more filtering and data export capabilities for a deeper data set. I don’t really see a meaningful use case for Founders unless you’re planning to build on top of their APIs, which don’t come with the Pro plan.

Pitchbook (Detailed capital market trends and analysis)

• Frequency: We’re digesting and referencing Pitchbook market reports on a quarterly basis. I’ve given them my email address, so they’re in my Inbox daily with a digest and probably monthly with a report, both of which I find valuable.
• What you get for free: Give your email address and get comprehensive market reports on VC/PE funding data across geos and markets. Good resource for justifying your “conservative” valuation with market data.

Tip: If you’re privately traded, you need to apply a 20-50% discount to public market valuation comparables..

SaaStr (Tactical SaaS advice)

• Frequency: I rarely find myself going direct to SaaStr, maybe once a month, not sure why that’s my cadence, just is I suppose. I follow @jasonlk and @saastr on Twitter and Quora and that pretty much suffices.
• What you get for free: I think, or at least hope, we all know Jason and SaaStr are leading SaaS [Lord, please give me the strength to find another word for Thought Leader] and provide an ongoing abundance of tactical SaaS advice. This advice is primarily sales and marketing and capital focused and generally enterprise-focused at the $1-$10M ARR range. Beyond that, you also get a lens into the mind of a VC (Jason) and many other Founders and Investors regarding what it takes to be a compelling investment candidate. Come to SaaStr for advice and takeaways, not trends or data.

CB Insights Newsletter (Macro industry/trends data)

• Frequency: Delivered daily. I like their voice, and they come with data. I didn’t mean to get religious in this piece, but here’s another God reference that CBInsights uses “In God we trust, all others must bring data.”
• What you get for free: Give your email address and join almost 500,000 other newsletter subscribers. They bring the snark and real talk and back it up with a lot of data and graphs. While less tactically useful than Pitchbook and SaaStr, CB Insights will make broaden your scope and may even make you sound smart!

VCs on Twitter

I can’t say I’m a Twitter Lists power user, but here’s one the “most popular” VCs.