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That's really cool. What do the size of the circles represent? Is it the same value as shown on the Y axis or something else?

And what do the colors of the circles mean?

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The size of the circles is also the I.P.O. value -- the same value shown on the Y axis.

In the first few steps, it's not terribly useful. But once you switch to the logarithmic scale, it's nice to keep a reference to the true (read, "linear") relative value.

Actually that's misleading. If the radius of the circles go up linearly, the area/size of the circle goes up exponentially. So on the logarithmic scale, the height changes with the log of the value but the size goes up exponentially!

Edit: nevermind this, it's wrong.

It looks like they scale it based on area, not radius... just by eyeballing it. Polynomial (not exponential) growth btw.

Nope. As @arscan says, in this as in most bubble charts, the value determines the circle's area, not the radius. Otherwise it certainly would be misleading.

I feel like Page 5 doesn't really represent the information it's trying to convey, which is how well these companies did 3 years later.

Yeah, that information is really represented in the transition between the pages. So I just ended up clicking back and forth between 4 and 5 to get a feel for those kinds of patterns (like an animated weather map).

yes, i think it would have been better if the y scale was ratio of current to ipo valuation.

It looks like the size of the circle is the same as the value on the Y axis. The advantage of having higher values have bigger circles is that you can make all the crowded companies at the bottom of the Y axis can have smaller circles.

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