59°
By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist
When an entrepreneur in Boston has a new idea, which investors see it first?I surveyed 91 entrepreneurs over the past week to create a list, from their perspective, of the "go to" VCs in Boston in five different categories. It turned out to be easier to determine the top dogs in software and the web than it was in fields like life sciences or semiconductors.
I solicited entrepreneurs to participate primarily by e-mailing people in my contact database who have started companies and raised venture capital before... but I also invited people to respond via Twitter. My question was simple: "Who is the first VC in Boston/New England you'd pitch?" I asked people to weigh in only on fields where they'd had experience:
- Social, mobile, consumer web, and games
- Enterprise-oriented software, services, software-as-a-service
- Life sciences, healthcare, and medical devices
- Cleantech, energy, sustainability, LEDs, and batteries
- Semiconductors, telecom, materials, robotics, and other "hard" technologies that don't fit into the cleantech category.
There was far more consensus on the first two categories than the last three. Top vote-getters in those categories received more than a dozen votes, while winners of the other categories rarely received more than three. That's both because I received fewer responses from entrepreneurs in fields like life sciences and cleantech, and also because votes were spread over a longer list of investors, especially in the life sciences category (where 44 respondents gave votes to 23 different VCs.)
David Skok and Antonio Rodriguez of Matrix, pictured above, were among those who made the list:
Social/consumer web/mobile/games (62 responses):
