A Crystal Ball for Startups

Younoodle is a social networking startup for people who love, well, startups. It has now unveiled a "startup predictor" that tries to forecast the future success of early-stage ventures, and even takes a stab at projecting their dollar value in three years' time.

The predictor is free to use. You fill out an 11-step questionnaire (which takes about half an hour to do properly) about the startup you are looking to value, focusing on four factors: the concept, the financials, the founding team, and the business's advisers. The predictor then spits out its estimated worth three years down the line. It also issues a score based on a 1,000-point index, which is meant to provide a view on how good an investment it is.

The questionnaire is very detailed and tedious in some places, especially when it comes to info about the founding members and investments to date. Younoodle wants to know specifics about the founders' relationships to each other, their educational backgrounds, ages, and previous startup experience, as well as details into how much funding the business has attracted thus far, and from whom.

Yet the questions around the business idea, as well as its financial performance to date, are minimal. That's because Younoodle's research (of no fewer than 3,000 startups) has shown that the most important predictor of success is the people involved, not the idea.

Naturally, there are a long line of entrepreneurs and bloggers lining up to kick the tires on this gadget. It's hardly surprising that those who get a high valuation out of the exercise (for example, TechCrunch, at $87.4 million) are more likely to be bullish about the tool's value, just as we all would like to believe that the most accurate scales are the ones that say we weigh the least.

Jessica Vascellaro on the Wall Street Journal's Business Technology Blog says the calculator is not at all flexible, since it asks for such detailed information and leaves no leeway for "I don't know" responses. Given that, it can really only be used by people with an insider's view of the company.

VentureBeat notes that while the valuations are generating the most attention, the index scores may be the more useful thing. Even if the valuations are not correct, startups' potential relative to each other might be.

Richard Tyler at the Telegraph proposes that the real benefit of this tool is the potential for startups to model their own hypothetical scenarios, such as seeing how adding a certain team member impacts its projected value.

TechCrunch has already put the tool to the test, retroactively valuing a slew of startups to see whether the predictions held: Slide was valued at $124 million (actual: $550 million), RockYou at $71 million (actual: $250 million), Powerset at $104 million (actual: $100 million), Cuil at $95 million, and Twitter at $110 million.

TechCrunch notes that YouNoodle predicted that Google would be worth just $88 million three years after it was founded, and Facebook's valuation was predicted at only $111 million. But the blog tries to explain away such huge misses by arguing that "the key is that YouNoodle would have predicted huge successes for all of these companies based on the exceptional teams put in place at the very early stages."

Hmmmm...seems like a low bar for success. If that's the level of insight that we can expect, it could be as easily gained by scanning the bios of a startup's founders.

Our verdict? It's fun, but not on its way to becoming the Moody's of the venture capital world anytime in the near future.

Liz Gunnison