I would like to focus on point #3 - market analysis software. In my opinion, this effort is misdirected for private companies. Simply put, the information available publicly on most of those is completely irrelevant. You can't infer anything about a startup from the number of twitter followers or alexa score - those are (inaccurate) vanity metrics that shouldn't be used for any serious investment decision.<p>The important information is (mostly) private - revenue, users, conversion, CPA, LTV, etc. Guess what - if you want to invest in private companies, you should be talking to founders and get the actual information.<p>Going back to the NASDAQ comparison - publicly traded companies have had market analysis software for years, and it hasn't been very good at predicting stock prices, even though there is much more information available, and historical data about a very important metric - stock price. Doing the same for private companies with the important data missing would produce the kind of results you can expect from it.