The Top 25 Y Combinator Winter 2017 Demo Day Startups — Mattermark Daily

On Tuesday and Wednesday, Y Combinator’s Demo Day for the Winter 2017 batch is taking place at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

Out of the 103 known (wildly different and interesting) companies in this batch, we ranked them and found the following 25 with the highest Mattermark Growth Score.

Here's your daily digest from the Mattermark Team

From the Investors

Manu Kumar of K9 Ventures outlines some tips for founders when making the tough choice of who to let invest and questions to ask during a reference call in “How to Reference Check Your Prospective Investor”

Ash Rust of Trinity Ventures details the art of getting a meeting with early stage VCs in "Seed Fundraising - How to Get a Meeting"

Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures finds it difficult to paint the seed market as anything other than healthy with different factors contributing to a strong financing market that support the very earliest companies in “5 Charts On The State Of The Seed Market In 2017”

Corey Ford of Matter Ventures interviews Chloe Sladden of #Angels to uncover her unique insights into the sometimes uneasy relationship between the spheres of media, technology, storytelling, and entrepreneurship in “The Drunken Walk, S1-E3: Chloe Sladden— Founding Partner, #Angels”

Ed Sim of Boldstart Ventures provides his thoughts on the Mulesoft and AppDymanics IPO filings in “What Does This Mean for Startups?” 

From the Operators

Leah Culver of Breaker reflects on her background, why she left Dropbox, and her passion for podcasts that led to starting a company in “Founder Stories: Leah Culver of Breaker”

Mathilde Collin of Front explains why as your business evolves, you’ll want to rely on data to help ensure you are building the right things, in the right amount of time and most importantly, the right way in “When “Gut Feelings” Aren’t Enough: Using Data to Plan Your Product Roadmap”

Nicky Goulimis of Nova Credit describes meeting her cofounders, getting an MBA, being a female founder, and gives advice for other founders in “Founder Stories: Nicky Goulimis of Nova Credit”

Jonas Downey of Basecamp discusses a strategy for identifying changes that might feel massively disruptive for users and the tactics behind launching these feature changes in ways that won’t upset your user-base in “How to Launch Software Changes Without Pissing People Off”

Simone Ahuja of Blood Orange offers some insight into how companies can retain and empower their entrepreneurial employees and offers some tips intrapreneurs can follow to break through bureaucracy in “Intrapreneurship is Product Management” (podcast)

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