Shrey Agarwal (Work Log)

Discovered that the Wayback Machine will not be a good option for identifying the time when a company went through the accelerator. Created a list of VC Companies and their earliest round date. Included a column for the date they went through their accelerators and will fill it in when we find a good method of finding this date.

10/16/17 15:00 - 17:00

Continued working on sorting VCCompanies by their earliest round date.

10/17/17 15:00 - 17:00

Worked with Ben to find a solution to our problem of data acquisition. Finalized earliest round date for VCCompanies.

10/18/17 15:00 - 17:00

Updated our VC data with Ed's help in order to increase the accuracy and completion of our data.

10/19/17 15:00 - 17:00

Organized all of our matched data and updated it in order to reflect the most recent SDC pull with Ed. Matched Crunchbase data with our cohort companies.

10/20/17 15:00 - 17:00

Generated the new list of VCCompanies as well as their earliest round dates.

10/23/17 15:00 - 17:00

Worked on sorting out the discrepancies in our matched data.

10/24/17 15:00 - 17:00

Went through list of VCCompanies and began adding respective accelerators in order to proceed with VCPercentage table.

10/25/17 15:00 - 17:00

Continued going through list of VCCompanies and adding accelerators.

10/26/17 15:00 - 17:00

Continued going through list of VCCompanies and adding accelerators. Will have this completed on Monday.

10/30/17 15:00 - 17:00

Finished adding all of the accelerators to the list of VCCompanies. Added a column indicating whether or not the company went through two or more accelerators.

10/31/17 15:00 - 17:00

Began compiling data in the column for the dates that a specific company went through an Accelerator.

11/01/17 15:00 - 17:00

Finalized entering dates for Y Combinator cohort companies.

11/02/17 15:00 - 17:00

Continued entering cohort company dates into Excel file.

11/06/17 15:00 - 17:00

Began looking at keywords for identifying the cohort class dates for each company

11/07/17 15:00 - 17:00

Received list from Peter with the accelerator founders matched from the Crunchbase LinkedIn URLs and proceeded to find the links for those founders without a match on Crunchbase. Data found in "Unfound Founders List" in the Fall 2017 folder

Spring 2017

01/17/17 14:00 - 16:00

Finished up "accelerating" from Accelerator Seed List (Data), numbers 341-351

1/18/17 14:00 - 16:00

Finished accelerating for sure, went back and began an overview of the work done for quality control.

01/20/17 14:00 - 16:00

Mandatory meeting, then worked through 2 of Ed's unfinished accelerators

1/23/17 14:00 - 16:00

Worked with Matthew to go over about 70 items in the accelerator list and ensure that they follow a uniform structure and show correct information

1/24/17 14:00 - 16:00

Worked with Peter to fix the problem with results not coming through on the new spreadsheet by renaming the file and including more symbols in the searches. Spreadsheet should be up to date now.
Got to number 144 on the list while going through files.

1/25/17 14:00 - 16;00

Continued looking through the list and fixing wrong entries or reporting them

1/26/17 14:00 - 16:00

Talked with Ed about project going forward and tried to access the Crunchbase API with Peter to crawl for start-up companies.
Continued working through the accelerator list, stopped at number 186.

1/27/17 14:00 - 16:00

Continued looking through accelerator list and fixing any entries with error. Got to number 261.

1/30/17 14:30 - 16:30

Got through about 425

1/31/17 14:00 - 16:00

Got to number 502

2/01/17 14:00 - 16:00

Finished looking through the initial list of accelerators and writing down which ones needed to be modified or completed (through 551)

2/03/17 14:00 - 17:00

Finished about 30 entries for the accelerator entries that still needed to be completed. Worked out of the "NOT DONE" file in the server (which is now blank because everything is finished)

2/06/17 14:00 - 16:00

Developed a standardized format for the text files with Matthew. Instructions are under "standardized format" in the accelerator seed list portion. I started at number 226 and standardized formats up until 370.

2/07/17 14:00-16:00

Continued work from yesterday, completed up to number 488 from the list. Will likely need one more day to finish.

2/08/17 14:00 - 16:00

Finished standardizing the txt files for use on the excel spreadsheet, compiled the data and examined the resultant tables. Realized we needed to fix some categories in the cohort files.

2/09/17 14:00 - 17:00

Worked with Ed on a side project trying to gather information on climate change thanks to Baker's article on the Wall Street Journal
Gathered information on climate change in relation to high-growth, high-risk innovation and organizations that deal with things such as carbon credits

2/10/17 14:00 - 17:00

Realized that blog post was ambitious because we could not really find a clear purpose from the information we gathered, nor could we find a unique angle. Held off on the idea
Went back to organizing the new columns and headers on the text file by identifying areas of error in the excel spreadsheet

2/15/17 14:00 - 16:00

Spoke with Ed about free enterprise while he lectured all of us. It took about an hour.
Looked at plans for project going forward including using linkedin to search the founders

2/20/17 14:00 - 16:00

Found our first source for expanding the project into incubators, from angel.co. Seems similar to f6s in that we can crawl it and obtain a list of incubators and their various counterparts.

2/21/17 14:00 - 16:00

Found more sources for incubators by reading through quora discussions and masters theses. Bookmarked these pages so that I could put them into text files after.

2/23/17 14:00 - 18:00

Converted incubator files to text-pad and saved them (4 total), then cleaned them up through regex
Took the cohort text file, put it into excel, and proceeded to clean up all of the mistakes in the excel document, particularly bad data or mistakes with organizations. Got through Y-Combinator.

2/24/17 14:00 - 16:00

Finished up cleaning the cohort data for the names and the descriptions, but there still needs to be work done on the other stuff like dates and programs

2/28/17 14:00 - 16:00

Created page Hub-Based Venture Firms and proceeded to research VC in Hubs listed on under E:\McNair\Projects\Hubs\summer 2016\Hubs Variables - Ariel.xls
Looked at details such as whether they have in-house funds, whether they co-invest, focuses, and amounts invested.

3/01/17 14:00 - 16:00

Worked with Ben and Matthew to pull data from SDC for all VC funded companies and normalized it to put it in an Excel document.

3/02/17 14:00 - 16:00

Tried to repeat the VC data pull without it crashing from pulling too many entries. Unfortunately, we were unable to finish it

3/06/17 14:00 - 16:00

Worked with Matthew to put final touches on the cohort data to prep it for matching with our VC data

3/07/17 14:00 - 16:00

Finally finished working on the cohort files, will match on the 8th

3/08/17 14:00 - 16:00

Matched the VC Data with the list of Cohort Companies and got one list of all cohort companies that have received VC funding.

3/20/17 14:00 - 16:00

Participated in a SQL training session with Ed, learned how to create a database and to pull tab delimited information from text files onto a table

3/21/17 14:00 - 16:00

Met with Ed and arrived at the conclusion of finishing the draft for a report by the end of the semester. Put the initial report information on the accelerator page using the variables that we currently have

3/22/17 14:00 - 16:00

Worked with Matthew to compile tables in our database of the matched VC-portfolio company lists and the overall accelerator cohort information. Found multiple errors in the cohort file which needed to be fixed before finishing the tables and analyzing the data

3/23/17 14:00 - 16:00

Finished cleaning the cohort file once again.

3/24/17 14:00 - 16:00

Continued practicing my SQL and creating the code for compiling the tables

3/29/17 14:00 - 16:00

Worked on the matched data with Matthew. Will run the RegEx code that will filter the URLs, and I will look through the duplicates where two different VC-backed company names matched to one cohort company name

3/30/17 14:00 - 16:00

Examined the Regex code for the URLs and attempted to filter them out

4/03/17 14:00 - 16:00

Continued learning some SQL from Ed

4/04/17 14:00 - 16:00

Began examining the Crunchbase data; looked through the 2013 snapshot
Created a new Crunchbase account with McNair center and examined the basic access, which does not give us much information

4/05/17 14:00 - 16:00

Made the final VC percentage table from our database and previous code with Ed; realized we were missing many accelerators as well as a lot of important cohort data so need to reexamine our previous data.

4/06/17 14:00 - 16:00

Continued looking through Crunchbase to see how we can pull accelerators up until 2013; most likely will use objects to sort the data into accelerators, perhaps keywords from "accelerators"

4/07/17 14:00 - 16:00

Examined SARP and attempted to match their accelerators with the ones from our data, realized that a few of our cohorts were missing as well as a few of the actual accelerators so we need to fix the data in our excel file
Began compiling a list of missing accelerators on textpad to later insert into our excel.

4/10/17 13:00 - 16:00

Worked with Ben to find missing accelerators from the Crunchbase data using the keywords. Also, began recording information from some of the big accelerators we were missing
Found 228 matches for accelerators, will match from our list to find the similarities

4/11/17 14:00 - 16:00

Finished compiling the accelerator and cohort information for the few we found from SARP, will consult Ed to figure out how to approach the missing accelerators and what to do for the preliminary report

Fall 2016

09/27/2016 14:00 - 17:00:

Set up personal and work log pages, accessed Remote Desktop.
Compiled list of accelerators from Wiki

09/29/2016 14:00 - 16:15; 16:45 - 17:30:

Created new project: Accelerator Seed List (Data) and worked with Dr. Egan to create schematic for data entry.
Evaluated 3 sources and logged data. Sources were taken from List of Accelerators. Logged each step onto project page and identified categories that would be suitable for web crawling sometime in the future.

10/11/2016 14:00 - 17:30;

Explored how to use regular expressions in TextPad to aid with data sorting (need to review expressions with Dr. Egan in future)
Continued evaluating sources from List of Accelerators and recorded steps onto project page, as before. Finished evaluating the six sources from initial list. (All work done in Accelerator Seed List (Data))

10/13/2016 14:00 - 17:00;

All work done in Accelerator Seed List (Data)
Talked to Dr. Egan about project going forward. Need to pick out 10-15 accelerators from the sources listed on my project page and identify a reliable method for obtaining cohort information, as well as other variables
Used google searches to identify more sources, and evaluated three databases with the help of TextPad
Began working on more generic google searches. Was able to go through "Location+accelerator"-type searches today. Will continue next time.

10/18/2016 14:00 - 17:30;

Work continued in Accelerator Seed List (Data)
Took a sample size of 10 accelerators and detailed how to extract cohort information, as well as what other information is readily available from accelerator URLs.
Brought Matthew up to speed on accelerator project, added summaries to each section so they became easier to follow, and worked with him to finish up extracting cohort information

10/20/16 14:30 - 17:30:

Work continued in Accelerator Seed List (Data)
Finished up the list of instructions for finding the cohort. Continued compiling the list of variables for each of the accelerators within the sample size.
Consulted Peter on prospects of creating a web crawler with the information we currently have compiled. Determined it was possible, although beyond the scope of Peter's knowledge.

10/25/16 14:00 - 17:00

Consulted Ed with next step for project.
Began listing the E-R diagram onto the accelerator database page where entities were potential categories and each entity had its associated attributes

10/27/16 14:00 - 17:00

Continued working with Matthew to identify elements in the E-R diagram for pulling information on accelerators.
Found sources to obtain/cross-reference information (ie. Angel List)

11/08/16 14:00 - 18:00

Identified possible keywords to filter results through for accelerators
Began compiling a comprehensive list of accelerators based on the data we have already sifted through.
Learned how to use regular expressions from Ben to sort names individually and alphabetically.

11/10/16 14:00 - 18:00

Began sorting through accelerator list and removing duplicates, as well as identifying more places to pull names from.
Worked with Peter to create a crawl for f6s because the website does not return only accelerators.

11/15/16 14:00 - 18:00

Took a break from f6s to locate more lists based on individual google searches such as "city+accelerator+list"
Put Seed DB information into an excel file on the remote desktop

11/17/16 14:00 - 16:00

Continued filling out information for the random Google Searches
Organized TextPad files on the RDP into coherent excel spreadsheets with proper headers on the table
Noticed problem with f6s: it seems although all of the html coding was protected by a captcha so the crawler did not actually extract any information; it was all blocked.

11/22/16 14:00 - 17:00

Worked to fix f6s crawler with Peter
Finished and compiled master list of accelerators

12/01/16 14:00 - 18:00

Caught up on project with Ed and Carlin
Took 20 accelerators (241-260) from the list and filled out text.html files for them; finished the 20

12/05/16 13:00 - 16:00

After finishing first 20 accelerators, continued working down the list, beginning at 321
Work noted in Accelerator Seed List (Data), but mostly stored on McNair RDP

12/06/16 14:00 - 18:00

Continued "Accelerating" down the list in Accelerator Seed List (Data), finished up until 340

12/08/16 14:00 - 17:00

Continued working on accelerator list on the same page.

Shrey Agarwal (Work Log)

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Spring 2018

Fall 2017

Spring 2017

Fall 2016

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