588 Kleiner Perkins iFund Applications Accidentally Published To Web

Michael Arrington

J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news. Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995) and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich... → Learn More

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

Kleiner Perkins’s iFund is a $100 million fund to invest in startups building applications for the iPhone.

Startups that wish to apply for funding can fill out an online application here. That information, which includes contact information, founder bios, the business plan, demos, financial information, etc. is then dumped into a database for review.

That data was accidentally published on the web by Kleiner Perkins’ former hosting provider, Meteora Technologies Group, in a SQL file, which is easily readable in a text editor or other application. The file was then indexed by Google and found in a query on one of the companies (the guys from Fruux found it). Applications from 588 companies are in the file (Google has cached an incomplete version of the file here). A quick perusal shows very detailed information from each of these companies.

Fruux notified Kleiner Perkins and Meteora and the file was removed this morning. I spoke to Lowell Fletcher, the President of Meteora, who says that they no longer work with Kleiner Perkins, and that the file was accidentally published by one of their employees. Kleiner Perkins has not yet responded to our request for comment.

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