Danielle, I enjoy your posts (and there have been a lot of them on HN of late) but question how much faith you want to put into Crunchbase. It suffers a bit from "Wikipedia disease" which is that its sort of self selecting and the quality of the information in it varies quite a bit. A great place to look for symptoms but I don't know how much faith you can put in conclusions drawn from it's data.
I can totally vouch for the lack of curating that is done on Crunchbase data because a couple of months ago I had people congratulating me on the 1.2M seed round that my startup had raised ... my startup that at the time did not even exist as a company yet much less had it been looking for investment.
I respect what Danielle is doing and her post have been interesting lately(leads me to wondering what the pivot for referly is going to be) but I definitely would not solely get data from places like Crunch base. They have some competitors out there who curate their data MUCH better but they also happen to charge for access to it.