Most of the information it requests is pretty generic. If you've raised a round and haven't announced it yet, then by all means, don't give it out.
However, for many startups, funding details will be public (and available via crunchbase or startupsearch) -- and generic ownership percentages can be pretty easily inferred. Asking whether investors own <10% or 10-40%, etc, isn't really saying much.
As for the rest of the information (mostly how the team relates to each other, their background, and previous work experience), I can't imagine this would be sensitive either, but if it is, by all means, don't give it out.
On a side note, and without wanting to be negative, at times I am not really sure they care about many things apart from growing really fast and getting momentum/exposure/traction (which is understandable).
You can gauge how much they (or anyone for that matter) care by the response you get when you try and engage with them. In this respect, my past experience has not been good (no response to emails/queries/etc), but maybe that is because I am not significant to them as an individual.
Babul - we aim to respond to every email and query, sorry to hear your experience. Feel free to email me: kirill@younoodle.com with more details and if you think we didn't cover any particular issue properly. Thanks.
* The connections-drawing tool is somewhat broken: First it wouldn't show for me at all ("Loading..."), and then when I wanted to correct something, the eraser didn't remove the lines (although I think it did invalidate them, because I could draw new lines on top of the old ones)
* Entering team details is very tedious when every single question is on its own page. I got tired of clicking next, and would very nearly have quit the process there.
I can't figure out what's wrong with the flash not loading - several people have reported this now. Can one of you guys hack it and reply with the answer? I'll buy you a pizza (no seriously, I will)
Is just loading... on mine as well (and I gave it plenty of time). User agent is:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070206 Firefox/3.0.1 FirePHP/0.1.0.3
Apparently my startup (tarsnap, online backups for the truly paranoid) will be worth $3.71M in September 2009. Given that I'm a sole founder and tarsnap is pre-revenue, I can only guess that YouNoodle is giving me very high marks for (a) having a doctorate from Oxford, and (b) having started university when I was 13 years old.
Of course, I'd be happy if YouNoodle was correct in their assessment... but if someone offered to buy tarsnap for $3.71M right now -- or offered to buy any fraction of tarsnap for a corresponding fraction of that amount -- I'd have no hesitation in accepting the offer.
EDIT: Yes, I do realize that the assessed value is effective a year from now -- but I still think $3.71M would be a generous amount to pay for tarsnap. Of course, tarsnap might take off faster than I expect...
I understand where you are coming from. Some of those calculations might be based on, for a lack of a better term, VC math, meaning if you are in the process of raising a series A, the VC might value your company (pre-money) at say 4 million, give you a A round of 2 million and own 50% of the company.
Depends how you define "launching". I haven't got the accounting code written yet, so revenue is still a month or more away -- but if you mean in the sense of "providing a service which people want", tarsnap has been up and running for three months.
These tools are really only as good as the information they are provided or access, and without looking at failure rates/reasons in the model do seem fundamentally flawed to me.
As mentioned by others, the results provided do look very optimistic (at least from what I can tell based on the values it provides for things I am involved with) and with refinement once they get the datasets will probably go down significantly in most cases.
Time will be the real judge. It will be interesting is to see what they predict and what actually happens in the next years. Hopefully they will provide this information (semi-)publically, but it seems unlikely.
Preying on the vulnerability/need for validation of most startup founders?