THIS IS STILL VERY MUCH A WORK IN PROGRESS! But, if you've somehow stumbled upon this hacky little side project, let me give you some context: I'm David McDonough and I work in Product Strategy at Google. I also work with Google Ventures/Google for Entrepreneurs mentoring/advising startups, and before Google I was a VC investor. Because of my work with GV/GFE, VC, I get approached almost daily by founders and entrepreneurs looking for help starting their company and/or raising capital. I've found that the vast majority of founders are completely unaware of all the great resources that exist and all the different options at their disposal that will help get their company off the ground. I kept repeating myself so I decided to see if I could build a more scalable way to dispense this advice to a larger audience... startit.today is the work in progress result... (Very much work in progress).

I think this tool can be most helpful as a starting point for founders to find a list of 20-30 investors/organizations/resources to target, depending on what they need. Once a founder has this target list, then the real grind is finding (stalking) a mutual friend, colleague, friend of a friend, etc who can make an introduction

I hacked this together using HTML, CSS, JS, SQL, PHP, and a few others to pull from Crunchbase, AngelList and Mattermark APIs and create a proprietary database of the best VCs/Angels/Incubators/Accelerators/Coworking spaces/Educational programs in the world. Then, I built an SQL query "algorithm" that ranks each of these resources based on relevancy to the charactaristics input by each specific founder/startup. I'm still very much in the process of refining the ranking algorithm but, I've included the current SQL query below:

SELECT
  numMatches,
  id,
  name,
  url,
  type,
  investment,
  equity,
  equitymin,
  equitymax,
  cashmin,
  cashmax,
  officespace,
  women,
  agecollege,
  race,
  nonprofit,
  length,
  description,
  type1,
  type2,
  type3,
  city1,
  city2,
  city3,
  city4,
  stateprov,
  country1,
  country2,
  country3,
  region1,
  region2,
  region3,
  industry1,
  industry2,
  industry3,
  industry4,
  industry5
FROM (SELECT
  (
  CASE
    WHEN type1 IN (
      'Mentor/Education',
      'Community/Coworking Space'
      ) THEN 1
    ELSE 0
  END + CASE
    WHEN type2 IN (
      'Mentor/Education',
      'Community/Coworking Space'
      ) THEN 1
    ELSE 0
  END + CASE
    WHEN type3 IN (
      'Mentor/Education',
      'Community/Coworking Space'
      ) THEN 1
    ELSE 0
  END + CASE
    WHEN city1 =
      'Mountain View' THEN 1
    ELSE 0
  END + CASE
    WHEN city2 =
      'Mountain View' THEN 1
    ELSE 0
  END + CASE
    WHEN city3 =
      'Mountain View' THEN 1
    ELSE 0
  END + CASE
    WHEN city4 =
      'Mountain View' THEN 1
    ELSE 0
  END + CASE
    WHEN country1 =
      'USA' THEN 1
    ELSE 0
  END + CASE
    WHEN country2 =
      'USA' THEN 1
    ELSE 0
  END + CASE
    WHEN country3 =
      'USA' THEN 1
    ELSE 0
  END + CASE
    WHEN region1 =
      'north america' THEN 1
    ELSE 0
  END + CASE
    WHEN region2 =
      'north america' THEN 1
    ELSE 0
  END + CASE
    WHEN region3 =
      'north america' THEN 1
    ELSE 0
  END + CASE
    WHEN industry1 =
      'advertising' THEN 1
    ELSE 0
  END + CASE
    WHEN industry2 =
      'advertising' THEN 1
    ELSE 0
  END + CASE
    WHEN industry3 =
      'advertising' THEN 1
    ELSE 0
  END + CASE
    WHEN industry4 =
      'advertising' THEN 1
    ELSE 0
  END + CASE
    WHEN industry5 =
      'advertising' THEN 1
    ELSE 0
  END + CASE
    WHEN officespace =
      'F' THEN 1
    ELSE 0
  END + CASE
    WHEN investment =
      'T' THEN 1
    ELSE 0
  END
  ) AS numMatches,
  id AS id,
  NAME AS NAME,
  url AS url,
  type AS type,
  investment AS investment,
  equity AS equity,
  equitymin AS equitymin,
  equitymax AS equitymax,
  cashmin AS cashmin,
  cashmax AS cashmax,
  officespace AS officespace,
  women AS women,
  agecollege AS agecollege,
  race AS race,
  nonprofit AS nonprofit,
  length AS length,
  description AS description,
  type1 AS type1,
  type2 AS type2,
  type3 AS type3,
  city1 AS city1,
  city2 AS city2,
  city3 AS city3,
  city4 AS city4,
  stateprov AS stateprov,
  country1 AS country1,
  country2 AS country2,
  country3 AS country3,
  region1 AS region1,
  region2 AS region2,
  region3 AS region3,
  industry1 AS industry1,
  industry2 AS industry2,
  industry3 AS industry3,
  industry4 AS industry4,
  industry5 AS industry5
FROM launchlab3) AS matchRankings
WHERE numMatches > 0
ORDER BY numMatches DESC