What about:
Groupon valued at 15B
Instagram: 7.5M raised, 0 revenue
Foodspotting: 3.7M raised, 0 revenue
Path: 100M offered, 0 revenue
about.me: acquired while in beta
Hipster: not yet launched, rumored to be acquired by Groupon.
Groupon valued at 15B
Instagram: 7.5M raised, 0 revenue
Foodspotting: 3.7M raised, 0 revenue
Path: 100M offered, 0 revenue
about.me: acquired while in beta
Hipster: not yet launched, rumored to be acquired by Groupon.
The way you make money investing in startups is to make a lot of bets that each have a small chance of paying off big. So while I'm not saying anything about the specific companies you list (most of which I don't know anything about), a list of recent startup fundings should always include a lot (perhaps a majority) that investors will ultimately lose money on.
The problem is, you don't know which the winners will be. They usually tend to look very unpromising. If you'd made this list 5 years ago, it would have included a web site for college students, bizarrely thought to be worth tens of millions of dollars.
Mark Suster: What Angel Investing & Florida Condos Have in Common http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/11/14/what-angel-inv...
Fred Wilson: The Dot Com Bubble Is Back http://www.secondshares.com/2010/11/18/the-dot-com-bubble-is...
The Trouble with Bubbles (talent, angel & incubators… oh my!) http://calacanis.com/2010/11/18/the-trouble-with-bubbles-tal...
Ok, not "exactly", but come on: "the majority of startup companies will end up losing money" sounds like a very bubbly thing.
In that sense, "majority of startup companies will end up losing money" is actually not a bubbly thing at all. Bubble mentality would be "most startup companies will IPO for huge valuations within a few years."
Fans and tweets are obviously the currency of the new millennium.
Some say the about.me acquisition has an excellent team and that's where the money went. myonepage.com is one guy. So you really gotta wonder how great that team actually was.
There's a lot of startups going crazy valuation at the moment with some serious hand waving about business models.
Bubble.
And Facebook will be one of the first to pop, I'm tempted to bet serious money on it. My Dad just joined, he's been a reliable harbinger of death for any popular website.
So I think maybe About.me is an unusual case.
I believe OnePage was a "growth first" type of startup, though I could perhaps have introduced pro accounts I don't believe it would have scaled. There is much more customer development I need to do in order to fully understand what the problem is and come up with a solution which resonates with people. I think the space is interesting and the problem is worth solving and will reward the person who does solve it, but I needed a way to try and get out of the freelance work lifestyle and fully into startups without taking funding or joining another startup, so the only real option was to build a SaaS type offering and charge from day 1. Buffer is working out well in that sense and could free my time soon. Once I reach that stage, I will need to decide whether to build Buffer further or use some of my time to rethink OnePage. Not sure which route I will take yet.
Very interesting indeed. I think something like OnePage is more suited for me after I've had some success with another idea or if indeed I had funding, but like you say even those with funding are not making much progress in that space.
I definitely agree that the about.me case was very different from the norm - the founder had previous sold a startup to AOL and worked for them for some time, so that was obviously a key factor.