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

1. Founding Date
   • Difficulty: Finding date based on our strategies
   • New Approach:
     1. Whois.net Date
     2. Factavia/other press release searches
2. 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
3. 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:
     1. Google key terms with address of Hub
     2. Start with partners and use google/crunchbase

Group 2

Variables Comfortable, Not Complete (rough order of most difficult to least difficult)

1. 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:
     1. Google searches and procedure to use on website yields decent results
     2. Similar procedure to onsite investors

1. 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+).

1. 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

1. 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

1. Size (sqft)
   • Levels: Number in sqft
   • Difficulty: Not all companies list square feet online
   • Approach:
     1. Google search with key words
     2. If results do not appear, use of press releases is possible

1. 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

1. Onsite temporary workshops and Networking Meetups (Count)
   • Levels:
   • Difficulty:
   • Approach:

1. Onsite code school and Curriculum
   • Levels:
   • Difficulty:
   • Approach:

1. Alumni Network
   • Levels:
   • Difficulty:
   • Approach:

1. Community membership?
   • Levels:
   • Difficulty:
   • Approach:

Group 3

Variables Easy to Obtain

1. 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
2. Site URL
   • Level: URL
   • Approach: Google using Veeral's code that allows us to search
3. Address
   • Level: Will include all addresses
   • Approach: Google key terms (e.g. Contact Us) and URL using Veeral's code
4. Nonprofit status
   • Level: 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
5. Mission statement
   • Level: 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
6. Specific Industry
   • Level: Industry included in statement (no aggregation)
   • Approach: *Based on Mission Statement, not aggregated
7. Price for a space/office
   • Level: Two prices one for shared, other for private
   • Approach: Uses google methodology with key terms and URL