A List Of Startups Goldman Sachs Thinks Will Most Likely IPO | Hacker News Reader

A List Of Startups Goldman Sachs Thinks Will Most Likely IPO

techcrunch.com

49 pointssahillavingia22 comments

To me, this seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sure, a startup has to do something in the market to allow moving forward to the IPO stage, but if one of the major underwriters for IPOs says "hey guys, I think you're likely to IPO in the future" to each of these startups, it's going to plant "hey, maybe it makes sense for us to IPO -- GS says we should!" in their heads.

That's not to say this is necessarily a bad thing, but it definitely doesn't say much about their ability to predict future IPOs.

A safe bet would be most of them are more likely to be acquired than IPO (not including Zillow because of: http://www.google.com/finance?q=zillow)

UPDATE: They removed Zillow... oh Techcrunch.

Somehow I don't think this would be on TC unless goldman wanted it that way. I'm fairly sure Goldman Sachs can keep secrets when they need to.

Zillow? Zillow's already public. I see a lot of careful work and research went into that list.

Nice to see things like Polyvore in the mix. It's easy to forget that there is a huge market for women which is totally under-represented in the general start up community. I believe there will be a gold rush catering towards this market in the future.

Heck even being slightly aware of it I can only name three, Door121, Polyvore and 99dresses.

Is the women's market limited to clothing and jewelry? You might also say the same about the men's clothing and jewelry market: not so many start-ups on those either.

Of course not. It is however the only female dominated market I have any experience in, and considering how successful Polyvore is you would expect there to be a lot of copycat sites.

Trunk Club is on the list and that's a personalized clothing site for men. It's probably the youngest of all the clothing sites on the list, which makes sense since it's the first one to successfully tap the men-only demographic.

I was surprised to see Uber on this list. I just won some credits to Uber and they informed me that they are still in beta so the wait times could be a bit longer than expected as they smooth things out. This is for Uber service in DC so maybe they are already well established in San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston and I am just unfamiliar?

How large is Uber? Is it really likely that Uber will IPO?

Travel and touring is a huge area - why Gogobot above the others? Friends in high places? What's the criteria?

Interesting its Crunchbase entry doesn't have a competitors pane: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/gogobot

I would have loved to known Goldman's #1 pick or top 10; instead we're given an alphabetically ordered laundry list of 32 startups.

This is just Goldman boosting everyone's ego.

If Quora can go public.. why not stackoverflow/stackexchange?

because, strangely enough, echo chambers of intellectually minded elites trying to impress each other are eminently more monetizeable than a pocket protector wielding sysadmin nerdcabal.

Quora!! oh comeon...

same.exact.reaction

It's so hilarious that people still tend to believe what GoldMan Sachs has to predict... By Gosh!!!

seems like there is a huge amount of deal of the day type sites on there(i.e. fashion/jewelery etc).

I dunno, I just don't see something like that IPOing...those sites are more likely to just sell to one of the big retailers in their space....or just stay private

how come foursquare and twitter were not there in the list?

I would imagine (and clearly, I'm not an IPO underwriter) that it might have something to do with proving they have a stable, profitable model. Twitter is finally on the way there with their ads, less sure about Foursquare.

Companies like Uber and AirBnb already have their business models mapped out, so even though they are orders of magnitude smaller, they are more attractive to IPO underwriters.

And Quora has its business model mapped out?

1. traction 2. ... 3. PROFIT!

There's also the possibility that, on the inside, those companies already have relationships with other banks and/or declined Goldman's invite.

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