Disruption Corporation

Disruption Corporation was established in 2013 by Paul Singh, a former partner at 500 Startups, with the goal of becoming the Goldman Sachs for the private market. Singh, an experienced entrepreneur with several startups and tenures at AOL and Symantec, identified a gap in the market for sophisticated data, research, and advisory services for private market participants, a space he believed was as underdeveloped as the public markets were three decades prior.

The firm operated a dual model, combining a research and data arm with a venture capital fund. Its core product was a data platform, initially known as Dashboard, which provided venture firms and angel investors with insights into private companies. This platform aggregated data from over 85 sources, including SEC filings and AngelList, focusing on secondary signals like social media activity and key employee movements to gauge a company's health and trajectory. Revenue was generated through subscriptions to its research products, such as the Disruption Daily, which delivered a daily report for a monthly fee.

Complementing its research activities, Disruption Corporation managed the Crystal Tech Fund, a $50 million post-seed venture capital fund launched in February 2014. This fund employed a "Moneyball" approach, making numerous small initial investments (around a quarter of a million dollars each) in 40 to 60 early-stage companies. The strategy was to then deploy the remaining 70% of the fund into the portfolio companies that demonstrated the most promising performance, leveraging the firm's own data platform to inform these follow-on investment decisions. The firm was headquartered in the Washington, D.C. area, specifically Arlington, Virginia, intentionally positioning itself outside of Silicon Valley to tap into different opportunities.

In November 2014, just over a year after its founding, Disruption Corporation was acquired by 1776, a global incubator and seed fund. Following the acquisition, Paul Singh became a Managing Director at 1776.

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