Hubs: Hubs Data
List of Variables
For a more in-depth of the variables and procedure please see: Hubs: Mechanical Turk. This page will reflect the variables being collected separated into three categories. Each variable will include a breakdown of levels being collected if the definition is not trivial and an approximate approach.
As of Week of 7/25
Group 1
Variables Difficult to Obtain
- Founding Date
- Difficulty: Finding date based on our strategies
- New Approach:
- Whois.net Date
- Factavia/other press release searches
- Multiple locations within city + Franchise (as of now just addresses)
- Difficulty: Company or establishment level will impact measurements
- New Approach: Will record all addresses at company level
- Onsite Venture Capital v. Angel Investors (e.g. # and Assets Under Management)
- Levels: Binary, list of investors
- Difficulty: Hub website usually does not include investors
- New Approach:
- Google key terms with address of Hub
- Start with partners and use google/crunchbase
Group 2
Variables Comfortable, Not Complete (rough order of most difficult to least difficult)
- Onsite accelerator
- Levels: Binary, count, list
- Difficulty: Usually not a list, which requires more scrubbing as many other variables just require us to find one page on a website.
- Approach:
- Google searches and procedure to use on website yields decent results
- Similar procedure to onsite investors
- Size (# members)
- Levels: Count for companies (currently not planning to include list of companies given that some potential hubs have 200+ members)
- Difficulty: Some companies don’t list all members - only selective ones-, others do not separate current members and alumni, and some just write "we have served more than 120 startups..."
- Approach: For companies that have a list, we will count. For those with select members, we will count those they listed and try to see if there is a comment about how many they have. For those that just have a statement "with over," we will write the number and + (e.g. "120+).
- Office hours investors and Office hours mentor/advisors
- Levels: Binary for OH, binary for two separate OH, list of names/descriptions of OH
- Difficulty: Some companies do not list who OH are with, not always obvious if investor, mentor, or advisor, sometimes not clear if mentor is investor/future investor
- Approach: Google approach to get to OH pages and then lookup key words in description to separate out
- Sponsors/Partners (University, Corporate)
- Levels: Count, list of sponsors/partners (if exist), separate columns for university and corporate
- Difficulty: Not all companies will list sponsors, partnesrs, or either
- Approach: Use two different levels and use of google search, then if list exists, separate by "college"/"university" and rest
- Size (sqft)
- Levels: Number in sqft
- Difficulty: Not all companies list square feet online
- Approach:
- Google search with key words
- If results do not appear, use of press releases is possible
- Onsite Mentors
- Levels: Count and list of mentors (if exist)
- Difficulty: Not all companies list mentors
- Approach: Use two different levels and use of google search
- Onsite temporary workshops and Networking Meetups (Count)
- Levels:
- Difficulty:
- Approach:
- Onsite code school and Curriculum
- Levels:
- Difficulty:
- Approach:
- Alumni Network
- Levels:
- Difficulty:
- Approach:
- Community membership?
- Levels:
- Difficulty:
- Approach:
Group 3
Variables Easy to Obtain
- Twitter activity
- Levels: Twitter Handle, # Tweets in a Month, # Followers, # Retweets
- Approach: Easy to get twitter handle from Turk or Veeral's code that allows us to run a series of searches on google and then use Gunny's Twitter crawler to get other levels from handle
- Site URL
- Levels: URL
- Approach: Google using Veeral's code that allows us to search
- Address
- Levels: Will include all addresses
- Approach: Google key terms (e.g. Contact Us) and URL using Veeral's code
- Nonprofit status
- Levels: Binary variable indicating if the potential Hub is a nonprofit organization
- Approach: http://www.guidestar.org/ is a site that we can use to search if a company is nonprofit or not
- Mission statement
- Levels: Official mission statement or description of company (if mission does not exist)
- Approach: If not explicitly stated mission statement, will include "About" or statements on main page
- Specific Industry
- Levels: Industry included in statement (no aggregation)
- Approach: *Based on Mission Statement, not aggregated
- Price for a space/office
- Levels: Two prices one for shared, other for private
- Approach: Uses google methodology with key terms and URL