I’ve always believed that unless you try your hand at something, you can’t really appreciate the people who do it well. That was my motivation in creating the VC Coinvestment Network Map I posted two weeks ago. And believe me, after munging that together I did appreciate the complexity of the process and the expertise of the people who can do it well.
As a side-benefit, I got to meet and talk to several people in the data visualization/network analysis community. Drew Conway over at Zero Intelligence Agents was the first, and he put up a visualization of the data that teased out some of the structure that I couldn’t find.
Now Linkfluence has put up a visualization that does something different. It doesn’t find the ‘bones’ of the data, as Drew did, but it allows you to find nodes and interact with them. Below is a screen shot of my node and its neighbors (i.e. the companies and people I have coinvested with, per Crunchbase and AngelList data as of two or three weeks ago*.) The screenshot doesn’t show my cursor hovering over KP, but that’s why their name shows up. Also, we added links back to the Crunchbase database from each node (some of the people don’t have CB entries, but that’s a small minority of the nodes.)
It’s pretty cool to play with. Take a look.
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* The caveats and filtering I did to the data noted in my previous post still apply.