TechCrunch’s Wilhelm on covering startups and their funding

Alex Wilhelm, a senior editor at TechCrunch, spoke with Mission North about covering startups and how they get funded.

Here’s an excerpt:

How many pitches do you receive a day? What do you look for when you get pitched?

I probably receive 15 to 20 marked ‘important’ emails per hour, not counting everything Gmail filters out for me automatically. Everyone’s feeling the extreme differential between the number of very interesting startups that are raising capital, which is at an all-time high, versus the number of hands actually typing up the stories, which is at an all-time low. You end up with a discrepancy in how many stories can be written.

The media world hasn’t had the best couple of years so it’s not surprising that there’s few of us focused on covering funding rounds. We try to get to as many cool ones as we can, but you end up having to be pretty selective. There’s so much that you can’t even get to five percent of them.

My personal bias is towards covering companies that will share lots of data. We’re way past the days when people would try to pitch funding news without a dollar amount attached. Companies willing to share harder metrics around growth, like valuation let you determine who might be more interesting. I try to highlight early-stage companies doing things that are risky and might fail.

Read more here.