Data in Reports
On Wednesday, the Omaha World Herald summarized the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce’s annual report. It was a great year for the Omaha Chamber.
However, what stuck out to me was the number of startups and the investment. This is one of the things that is the hardest to report on and make sense of. I spend a good deal of my time thinking about ways to get an accurate real-time view of the startup ecosystem. In the report, the Omaha Chamber called out 2017 numbers of 33 startups, $8.7 million in investment and 2016 numbers of 31 startups with $32.2 million in investment.
https://nvca.org/research/ecosystem-dashboard/
These numbers differ from the NVCA numbers on their dashboard. But, guess what. IT IS STILL RIGHTISH. Investments do not always get reported to the NVCA nor are they always done in a public manner. While it is useful to have healthy skepticism of numbers reported by organizations that benefit from the numbers. It does not mean that they are wrong.
If you are interested in other places that you might find investment numbers – I’d look at formds.com and Silicon Prairie News, siliconprairienews.com. Again, these numbers are not always exactly right either. Reporting real-time startup activity is difficult and often misleading because citations are difficult (sometimes because the reporter has data that is closely held and cannot be cited).
No matter what the data, Omaha continues to have solid startup activity. Good job to the many mothers and fathers of startups.